The documentary Chasing Goals, directed by a local filmmaker, shot in Kansas City and produced in part by the Chiefs and comedian Trevor Noah, will leave you inspired and heartbroken.
The documentary, which premiered at KC’s Full Tilt Film Festival, a sports-orientated weekend of films, follows young refugees who have resettled in Kansas City’s Historic Northeast neighborhood and found community, purpose and hope through soccer. The film traces the enormous obstacles they’ve faced—from war and displacement to profound personal loss—and the resilience required to build new lives in an unfamiliar country.
The showing was the closing event of the inaugural two-day festival and industry summit created by the Kansas City Film Office around a niche particularly suited to this sports-obsessed city: storytelling at the intersection of sports, film, media and culture.
Held Aug. 28 and 29 at venues around Kansas City, Full Tilt brought together filmmakers, athletes and entertainment-industry executives for screenings, panel discussions and live events. Friday’s programming included a 20th-anniversary Friday Night Lights event at Union Station, while Saturday’s festival activities centered largely around 18th & Vine. Other films included ESPN’s The Brittney Griner Story, about the WNBA star’s imprisonment in Russia, and The Future Is Flag, exploring the rise of flag football. Discussions featured speakers from ESPN and other major sports and entertainment companies.
The choice of Chasing Goals to close the festival was fitting. The documentary is deeply rooted in Kansas City but also illustrates something Full Tilt was created to explore: the increasingly blurry line between professional sports organizations and entertainment companies.
Chasing Goals follows Global FC, a nonprofit soccer club in the Northeast neighborhood made up of boys who are refugees and immigrants from war- and poverty-scarred countries. Their commonalities are suffering, perseverance and football, which creates a bond that’s part family, part symbiotic and entirely a blessing to watch as they tackle adversity together. The boys’ stories are interwoven with footage of them practicing for and playing in the Target USA Cup, a massive international youth soccer tournament outside Minneapolis.
“A lot of obstacles will come, but if you show up with strong heart, you’re going to overcome those obstacles, like me,” instructs muscular 15-year-old Donat, one of the film’s stars. He solemnly recalls, brows furrowed, a desperate East African childhood growing up in a Tanzania mud hut, as well as the death of his sister from illness just two weeks before reaching the United States and, eventually, Kansas City.
It’s one of several scenes that left viewers gasping during showing at the Gem Theater in KCMO’s 18th & Vine neighborhood.
Among the documentary’s producers are Trevor Noah’s Day Zero Productions, sports media studio Wavelength and Foolish Club Studios, an entertainment studio launched by the leadership of the Kansas City Chiefs in February 2025.
Foolish Club Studios represents the Chiefs’ ambitions well beyond game-day football. The company was created to develop original scripted and unscripted entertainment, both short- and long-form, including stories that aren’t necessarily about the Chiefs. It is separate from the team’s longtime in-house production operation, 65 Toss Power Trap Productions, which remains focused primarily on Chiefs and football content.
Even the new studio’s name reaches back into Chiefs history. Founder Lamar Hunt and the seven other owners who created the American Football League were dubbed the “Foolish Club” for having the audacity to challenge the firmly established NFL. The two leagues eventually merged, and Hunt’s once-foolish idea helped transform professional football.
Now the Chiefs are borrowing that same name for their push into entertainment.
The studio followed its involvement with The Kingdom, the six-part ESPN and Disney+ docuseries chronicling the Chiefs’ history and 2024 season, by venturing outside the franchise with Chasing Goals. Rather than Patrick Mahomes and Arrowhead Stadium, this film puts the cameras on refugee teenagers playing soccer on beat up fields in Kansas City’s Northeast.
Human rights advocate Mariya Dostzadah Goodbrake, herself a former refugee whose family fled Afghanistan, founded Global FC in 2014 after seeing soccer pitches provide a ray of light to children in an otherwise grim Jordan refugee camp. After moving to Kansas City in 2013, Goodbrake was soon familiar with the Northeast’s global immigrant population, many of whose beginnings in the U.S. start in the neighborhood.
Often children are the “cultural navigators” for parents starting a new life in the United States, Goodbrake explained during a Q&A after the film. Kids are often guiding adults through language barriers, finances and unfamiliar cultural practices.
“That’s an incredible amount of stress that you carry along as a child,” Goodbrake said.
Director Josh Gloer, a longtime Liberty resident, started filming the team in 2023, close to when Global FC was gearing up to play in the youth Target USA Cup. The filmmaker says he never set out to make a sports film.
When the U.S. military left Afghanistan in 2021 after nearly two decades, leaving behind thousands of Afghan citizens who had worked alongside Americans during the war, Gloer saw it as a betrayal.
“It was something that really bothered me,” he recalled.
Frustrated, Gloer and his family started volunteering with resettlement agencies in the Northeast. He admits that despite growing up roughly a 20-minute drive away, he didn’t even know about the neighborhood or the community that existed there. It’s a suburban-sprawl reality shared by many Kansas Citians without the inclination—or reason—to leave their zip code very often.
“We went to a Kansas City I didn’t even know existed,” he said.
The Northeast neighborhood is almost as much of a star in the film as the boys. Those familiar with the area will recognize spots along Independence Avenue, and East High School is featured prominently as the team’s practice site.
Like many of ESPN’s best sports documentaries, Chasing Goals isn’t strictly a sports film. In fact, that may be part of what attracted the Chiefs’ new entertainment studio to it. Foolish Club Studios says its mission extends beyond the franchise itself to stories about perseverance, ambition and people willing to pursue improbable goals.
That description could have been written for Global FC.
But the larger human story doesn’t take away from the excitement of the soccer. The Gem Theater crowd cheered loudly more than once as Global FC scored during the USA Cup.
The cheering is for boys like Donat, who made himself a promise to work hard on and off the field “because I don’t want to go back to a place like that, or my siblings, to ever go to a place like that again,” he said.
Another boy, Maposo, also from Tanzania, describes escaping turmoil and at times having to “fight for food.” Yet he says he would like to return someday, after receiving medical training, to help others. For him, discovering that gun violence in Kansas City can sometimes keep him from safely going outside is particularly distressing.
Three years after filming, many of the players are still in the area in some capacity and were on hand for the red-carpet premiere. Throughout the film, viewers learn of their inspirational—and sometimes heartbreaking—fates, all anchored by the game that first brought them together.
That Chasing Goals made its world premiere at Full Tilt also brought the festival’s larger idea full circle. Kansas City has become accustomed to thinking of itself as a major sports city. Full Tilt is making a different bet: that the city can become a place where important sports stories aren’t merely happening, but are being discovered, financed, filmed and brought to audiences around the world.
And with Chasing Goals, one of the city’s most powerful sports organizations isn’t simply part of the story. It’s helping tell it.