Special Presentation

It is August 1971. Football teams from England, Argentina, Mexico, France, Denmark and Italy are gathering at Mexico City’s Azteca Stadium. The scale of the tournament is monumental: lavish sponsorship, extensive TV coverage, and crowds of over 100,000 hollering fans turn this historic stadium into ‘a cauldron of noise and heat’ match after match. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the greatest moments in international footballing history.

But this is a tournament unlike anything that’s happened before. The players on the pitch are all women. And it’s likely you’ve never even heard of it. This is Copa 71, the unofficial Women’s World Cup. This event has been entirely written out of history. Until now.

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James Erskine is a British screenwriter, film director and producer. The Human Face, which he co-directed, was nominated for the Outstanding Non-Fiction Special Emmy Award in 2002. Rachel Ramsay multilingual filmmaker with strong journalistic experience and specialism in cross-cultural broadcasting for feature documentary, current affairs and factual TV. known for Copa 71 (2023), Le Mans: 3D (2017) and The End of the Storm (2020).

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