Despelote (2025)

developed (primarily) by Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena (and many others)

spoilers for Despelote

Everyone is taller than you. Inanimate objects obtain movement when you touch them. Posters wink at you or sparkle or embiggen the number one, projecting the dream of Ecuador’s football team winning the 2002 World Cup, of being number one. A dream of placing Ecuador onto the world stage where it has been given courtesy acknowledgements but largely ignored, just as you, the child Julián, are. How cute is it that Julián is dressed up so fancy for a relative’s wedding? How cute is it that Ecuador thinks they have a shot against the heavy hitters of Argentina, Brazil, and Germany?  Save for the teacher, all adults are welcoming and gracious to the child Julián in their brief interactions. Their conversations are focused on other adults, not a child. Teenagers are the only hostile individuals who push you down if you steal their ball or snitch on their shoplifting. Even as a teen himself at a party, Julián is uneasy and uncertain of his acceptance by others as they all converse around him and not with him. The final section, in which Julián passes the football with two friends as an older teen, is warm and relaxed. It bears the conversational pacing and nonchalant subjects that previously surrounded him only ever as an observer and is now something he partakes in. Just as casually, the point of view is transferred to the ball as it gets bounced around time and space as familiar faces all pass it between one another. Football is a powerful and unifying force that transcends space and time.

When focusing on the television screen Julián’s peripheral vision fades away as his focus is consumed, usually by archived recordings of the contemporary matches: Ecuador versus Peru, Argentina, Colombia, and Bolivia. The entire country participates in this viewing out of national pride. One that can take any form, whether it is speedwalking due to race walker Jefferson Perez taking Olympic gold in 1996 or taking “to the streets to show their love” for Colombian coach “Bolillo” Gomez after he was shot in the leg. On television someone proclaims, “This is sport: a jersey. And it has nothing to do with violence. Even less with politics.” And yet Ecuador’s political history unfolds itself in lock step with its progression towards the World Cup. Accounts of the economic crisis and “dollarization” are followed immediately by Ecuador’s upcoming match against the mighty Argentina. Newspapers headline football and sidebar economic developments. Ecuador’s history is viewed through the eyes of a child who shares the country’s passion for football but can only recite the facts of the greater events around him retrospectively with no real opinion of his own. More recitation than recollection.  Football and politics are two sides of the same coin. Anxiety over political instability is soothed through football. Success in football validates their fight to regain stability.

Football goes hand in hand with every action and event. It is in the school rooms just outside the window, it is on the minds of the children as they listen to their teacher drone on about mountains, it is at their feet as they pass to each other and trade off playing goalie. Every qualifying match is the locus of each chapter as you wander about a park in Quito, Ecuador. Interludes between chapters consist of mostly playing football. At first I believed these interludes to be dreams, but they reveal themselves to be flashes forward in Julián’s life: as he attends a soccer club, gets drunk at a party, is confronted by his mother for lying about where he would be. This last situation has a sly transition. While playing Tino Tini’s Soccer as a child his friends berate his sister until she runs away crying and Julián is subsequently lectured by his mother. As his focus is constricted on the television you do not notice you are now an older Julián playing the same game until his mother reenters the frame of focus bearing streaks of white hair. Another great transition comes shortly afterwards, as you continue to play the Tino Tini game. The match ends and the little blobs of players make their way off the field and into the city outside until your player walks into the house and jolts you awake at the screen. These playful and invisible transitions are accomplished as time flows according to no set measurement or speed. Chapters are hard cut transitions forward in time, but contain memories, daydreams, and the accelerated speed of childhood fun all flowing intermingled.

Unrestricted by time or space, the greatest deceit is in plain view. The world through Julián’s eyes is monochromatic, introduced first by the black and white in-game videogame of Tino Tini’s Soccer ‘99, and bleeds into Julián’s real world surroundings. Detailed photogrammetry scans are downscaled, filtered through a pointillism screen, and reduced to a single color. Motion bearing objects and people are rendered as hand drawn figures of black and white with thick outlines. Hard details living hand in hand with substantial swaths of images being out focus match the fluidity of memory and dreams. During interludes I filed the odd shaped landscapes covered in wrong angled trees and buildings as “dream logic.” At the very end the veil is lifted in a powerful way: this landscape is not a result of illogical dreams but instead a 3D render of Google map data of the park and city as it exists now. Our narrator addresses this fact directly to us and continues to comment on the development of the game, revealing a second deception: that Julián is older than the developer was during the timeframe depicted. Despelote is more recreation than recollection, not only of the external but also the internal, as developer Julián Cordero was four, not eight, during this time and does not remember as much as he wishes. He never visited that park in Quinto until after it had been heavily remodeled as a result of the first World Cup qualification. Does this deception invalidate the potent recreation? Do we need our autofiction to hew closer to truth than imagination? Not at all! Accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, Japanese author Kazuo Ishiguro included in his speech this fundamental truth that reverberates throughout all of Despelote: “But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel this way to you?”^[1]