African Dream

African Dream

The story begins in 1975. The then 35-year-old manager Blatter is the first European to organize a football tournament in Africa. For Coca Cola he invites young Africans to the event. One year later hundreds of thousands of Black people demonstrate for their rights on the streets of Soweto near Johannesburg. The uprising is brutally crushed. It marks the beginning of the end of the apartheid era.

35 years later a black president is heading the country and former ANC activists are organizing the biggest sports event in the world - the FIFA World Cup - an event that Sepp Blatter brought to South Africa. We go back to his roots, to where he grew up. We accompany him to the Sepp Blatter Tournament in the Swiss canton of Valais. We are at the FIFA Palace in Zürich where Blatter painstakingly plans the gigantic event and where he receives African heads of state. We show Blatter on a journey to Africa a year before the championship - here we speak to adults and children from the townships about their dreams - and about football.

African Dream tells the story of Sepp Blatter's dream of organizing the first football world championship in Africa. And the dream of the Black population in South Africa to finally receive recognition through the 2010 World Cup.