One of the best feel-good films of recent years is now available to watch in the comfort of your own home—preferably with a bottle of something decent close at hand. Competitive wine-tasting documentary Blind Ambition is now on digital release, available to rent or buy.
Directed by Robert Coe and Warwick Ros (the latter of whom co-directed the 2013 wine doco Red Obsession, while Coe was executive producer), Blind Ambition follows four Zimbabwean men—Pardon Taguzu, Joseph Dhafana, Marlvin Gwese and Tinashe Nyamudoka—as they prepare for to test their skills at the 2017 World Blind Wine Tasting Championships (WBWTC) in Burgundy, essentially the Wine Olympics. When we meet them, all four are working as sommeliers in South Africa, having fled the oppressive Mugabe regime in their homeland for safer climes.
What unfolds is a kind of real-world Cool Runnings, only with wine instead of bobsledding, as this team of plucky outsiders give it their all and take on the entrenched wine world hierarchy. But this isn’t just a simple slobs vs snobs story; for one thing, our four protagonists have no beef with the powers that be, and there’s little gatekeeping going on—although it’s clear that moving in these rarefied circles is certainly financially taxing for the quartet and their team.
For another, all four are refugees, and so while Blind Ambition works a treat as a doorway into the world of high-end wine competitions, it’s also a thoughtful examination of the refugee experience, and how a person’s life can encompass such disparate extremes of experience.
Our own Travis Johnson said that Blind Ambition is not just a fun film about wine, but a work that “…champions the very notions of cultural exchange and authenticity,” If that sounds like a good time, reach for the remote control and the bottle opener tonight–you’re in for a treat.
