Film scheduled for completion in early 2022

Jamaica has commissioned a documentary highlighting the island’s debut at the 2019 FIFA Women’s Football World Cup. 

The task has been given to Santa Clarita film maker, Zuriel Oduwole to tell the story of the nation’s women’s football World Cup debut.

The film would chronicle the unlikely but sensational journey of Jamaica’s women’s football team to their first ever participation in the FIFA World Cup when it was held in France in 2019.

That team and its journey to the World Cup was full of promise and has become an inspiration for the next generation of young women.

The 2019 edition of the World Cup edition was won by the USA women’s team. 

The documentary is scheduled for completion in early 2022, and as part of Oduwole’s global education development initiatives, she plans to show versions of it across high schools in the Los Angeles County area, during that school year.

Sports Minister Grange introduced Oduwole to tourism and sports industry leaders

 Jamaica’s Minister of Sports Olivia Grange, who had introduced Oduwole to leaders of Jamaica’s tourism and sports industry, said: “This young lady brings a unique and fresh approach to what we are trying to show the world.”

Four years ago, Oduwole’s second full length film, Follow The Ball for Education, which began production during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, was shot across five countries on three continents, starting in Brazil. 

Telling the story of a young girl taking two footballs across the globe to get people talking about girl’s education, it opened to critical acclaim when it premiered in 2017 before several diplomats and their wives, global business leaders, representatives of major foundations such as the Ford Foundation and Dangote Foundation, the European Union, governors, the media and many from the education sector.

A year later, in 2018, the African film maker was welcomed to Ghana by President Nana Akuffo Ado, where one of the topics discussed was the country’s initiatives to bringing Hollywood talent to shoot movies across Ghana’s historic sites, including the Cape Coast and Elmina castles. Outside of travel and sports, Oduwole was chosen in 2018 by several Island countries (Fiji, Samoa, Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Marshall Islands) to tell their climate change story to global leaders by film, after the COP 23 conference in Bonn, Germany. As an 18-year-old, the West African nation of Senegal tapped Oduwole to tell the Goree Island story in 2017 to better educate young Americans as part of Black History Month in the United States. Now Jamaica has been confirmed as her next focus.