The world sees Megan Rapinoe as the ultimate badass, as unflappable in confronting ignorance and inequality off the field as she is fearless on it.
Yet every woman can identify with the two-time World Cup champion as she is seen sitting in the back of a car, exhausted and frustrated by a fight for equity that has been raging for decades.
“It’s not easy to constantly have to demand your worth. Or tell people how good you are. Or tell people you deserve to be a full human,” Rapinoe says in LFG, a new documentary on the U.S. women’s equal pay lawsuit against U.S. Soccer that begins streaming Thursday on HBOMax.
Filmmakers Andrea Nix-Fine and Sean Fine, who won an Oscar in 2013 for their short documentary Inocente, began exploring the idea for the film in 2019, after the U.S. women sued U.S. Soccer for gender discrimination, claiming they had been paid less than the U.S. men’s team. No other women’s sports team had sued their employers before, let alone three months before a World Cup, and Nix-Fine and Fine were intrigued.
“We wanted to go beyond headlines, beyond soundbites and show what it was like to truly take on your employer,” Fine said.
The documentary features Rapinoe, Jessica McDonald, Sam Mewis, Kelley O’Hara, Christen Press and Becky Sauerbrunn, as well as members of the players’ legal and public relations team. The behind-the-scenes access is extraordinary, including screen shots of group texts and footage of late-night conference calls and Zoom meetings, and shows just how intimately involved the players are while still being successful athletes, for club and country.
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