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By Peter Della Penna

While American sports fans often get to see their fair share of baseball, basketball and football themed movies, it’s not often that cricket hits the silver screen in this country. However, people in Southern California will get an opportunity this weekend when Rohit Kulkarni’s “Pitch of Dreams: Cricket in America” will be shown in the Pickford Theater at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood on Sunday July 11 at the All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival.

“It’s really funny that apart from the cricket playing community, a lot of people don’t know about the happenings of cricket and it would be a good opportunity for people in Los Angeles, especially sports lovers, to know more about the game of cricket, the history of this game and also the current situation of this game,” said Kulkarni, who filmed portions of the 40-minute documentary at Woodley Cricket Ground in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys.

Kulkarni says that his film has appeared in three other festivals so far this year, including the East Carolina Film Festival in April. The students at ECU gave Kulkarni a very positive response and he hopes that plenty of students from USC and UCLA, as well as the rest of the local community, will have the same reaction if they come out to watch the film. “Pitch of Dreams: Cricket in America” is scheduled to be screened on Sunday at 12:25 pm along with three other short films packaged together to form Short Series G on the event schedule. Tickets are $10.

“The biggest selling point is obviously its association with mainstream America in the sense that the historical association that America has with cricket which is fairly unknown, even the baseball fanatics here don’t know that before baseball it was cricket and the guy who wrote the first rules of baseball was a cricket player,” said Kulkarni. “So there are certain interesting elements about the history.”

One of Kulkarni’s reasons for making the film was to help bridge the gap in terms of American sports fans’ knowledge about cricket by giving them something concrete to watch and absorb.

“They have heard it, but they haven’t really seen. The one thing that was consistent throughout a lot of people that I met, everyone mentioned that they don’t understand the game,” said Kulkarni. “They just know it’s closer to baseball and every time they’ve visited England or other countries they have seen it on TV. But no one I think ever attempted first to make this connection and show the excitement related to cricket and I think that’s one of the main factors of this documentary, to show America that this game is very exciting and a lot of people are playing it, whether it’s the immigrant population or whether it’s the first, second generation of American kids.”

A total of 67 films will be shown from July 10-11 at the All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival with a mixture of fiction and non-fiction entries, shorts and feature length movies. The sports that will be on view besides cricket include popular ones like baseball, basketball, football and soccer while other films delve into the worlds of rugby, boxing, cycling, surfing, judo, horse racing, marathon running, Aussie Rules football, kite running, lacrosse, badminton, roller derby, wrestling and hula hooping.

Kulkarni plans to enter his film into several more competitions this year, including the South Asian Film Festival in New York. DVD copies of the film are also available to purchase. For more information about “Pitch of Dreams: Cricket in America” write to citylightsfilms@gmail.com.

For more information about the All Sports Los Angeles Film Festival, visit www.allsportslafilmfest.com.  You can also watch a trailer by clicking here.