To Rent: Sync Or Swim

Hi Everyone,
Happy National Girls & Women In Sports Day!  In honor of this momentous occasion, I’m gonna come out and say something in I’ve been holding in for 4 long years ... I love the Summer Olympics... I mean, a lot.

It's the kind of love where I spend an entire month picturing myself in a shiny track suit standing on a podium, waiving a bouquet of flowers in front of an American flag.  Track & field, cycling, the weird sports like fencing and badminton, swimming, gymnastics… ooh, don’t get me started on the gymnastics. Men’s, Women’s, I love it all. 

But there is one sport that I find far more compelling than the rest. It’s a sport you’ll rarely find airing during the coveted 8pm time slot.  The bathing beauties of the Synchronized Swimming team are always tucked somewhere in the middle of the day between the Today Show and Days of Our Lives... But not anymore. 

Look what I found!




Filmmaker Cheryl Furjanic opens a window in to a sport that has been overlooked by the mainstream for far too long. It’s one of two Olympic events that is exclusive to female athletes, and is often dismissed in conversations regarding the level of athleticism and rigorous training that is required to become an Olympian.  (5 points if you can name the other sport.)

Sync Or Swim takes you beneath the choreography and sparkly outfits, and in to the lives of these athletes who spend hundreds of  grueling hours in and out of the water, training to make it all look so effortless. 

“Sync or Swim provides a firsthand account of the nine women of the United States Olympic Synchronized Swimming Team as they endure and overcome obstacles in training to compete for the Olympics. It follows the lives of these athletes as they undergo day-by-day training, attempting to perfect an excruciatingly difficult routine where split-second timing is everything.” Garden Thieves Pictures

In honor of every girl who’s ever played a sport, please support this film. You can rent it here, on iTunes for $3.99. (Which is cheaper than anything else we tell you to do.) And you can download the app for free!

The film maker, Cheryl Furjanic, is pretty great too.. Here’s a little info about her:

FILMMAKER BIO:
Cheryl Furjanic is an award-winning filmmaker who has been teaching documentary production at New York University for over a decade. She is currently directing Back on Board – a feature documentary about the life and legacy of Olympic champion diver Greg Louganis. Her first feature documentary – Sync or Swim (2008) – received numerous awards, including a Billie Award for Journalism from the Women’s Sports Foundation, and is now available on DVD and iTunes. Her short documentary and fiction films, which range in length from 30 seconds to 13 minutes, have screened at 100+ festivals worldwide and on television. Cheryl holds a BFA in Film & Television Production from NYU’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts and a Masters degree from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. When she’s not making films, Cheryl researches audience relationships and fandom in fiction television.


She's badass.. Trust me, I've met her. 


xx
LAF