Logline:
Following a disappointing showing at the 2005 women’s sumo world championship, 25 yr. old heavyweight Katherine Hurley trains for a return to Osaka in 2006, and a possible rematch with Olesya Kovalenko, the big Russian who put her on crutches.
Synopsis:
In October, 2005, hundreds of sumo wrestlers converged on Sei Unso, a small hotel in Osaka’s industrial district. For a week, giants roamed the hallways, late night festivities tested the hotel staff’s classic Japanese patience, and elevator alarms buzzed incessantly, as “maximum occupancy†became a very real threat rather than an unlikely precaution.
Among the athletes gathered there was Katherine Hurley, a 25 yr. old heavyweight from New Jersey, who began her sumo career largely on a lark only two years earlier. An erudite journalist with an ivy-league education, Katherine once wryly wrote that sumo “makes heroes out of people who can’t fit in airplane seats… and makes for the odd sidelong glance here in America.†And yet with each passing tournament, this curious sport, which began as an ironic pastime, was becoming more and more a serious part of her identity, appealing to the fierce competitor within.
Legend attributes the very origin of the Japanese race to the outcome of a sumo match, and as such it is much more than just a sport---it is a cultural artifact, handled with severity by the men who run it. While male foreigners are begrudgingly tolerated, females are not. The first sumo matches were in fact a form of Shinto ritual, and women, impure by virtue of their menstrual cycles, were not even permitted within the arenas, let alone the dohhyo (the central ring where the fight takes place). Though women have been permitted to watch sumo for several decades, their exclusion from the dohhyo holds true in professional sumo (ozumo) even today. Which means that when many of these women aren’t being treated as oddities, they’re being treated as interlopers by much of Japanese society.
Unfortunately, Osaka 2005 turned out to be a disappointment for Katherine. Bent over backwards by Olesya Kovalenko, a Russian heavyweight who had beat her in international competition before, Katherine’s trip ends on crutches, with visions of a lengthy rehabilitation adding insult to her injury.
We hope to catch up with Katherine following her rehabilitation, as she trains for the 2006 championships and a possible rematch with Olesya. Combining existing ’05 footage with glimpses of her daily life, as well as interviews with friends and family, Lady Sumo will create an intimate human framework upon which to build a larger, societal picture. An astute social critic, Katherine is a self reflexive lens through which we will explore this unique manifestation of “Girl Power†in its most literal--and least MTV friendly--sense. And in 13 yr. old teammate Helen Delpopolo we find a perfect contrast in personalities, a precocious and tomboyish lightweight, for whom the issues of sexual politics and identity, body image and self-esteem, are secondary to the opportunity to stay up way past her bedtime, hanging out and partying with the big girls.
In the tradition of Hoop Dreams, Spellbound, and Rollergirls, Lady Sumo uses the phenomenon of sport as a springboard towards larger issues: of tradition versus change, of individual versus society, and of the universal experience that awaits us daily, as we rise to take on whatever challenges await us in our own private dohhyos.
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