In American high school sports, for most schools, it’s football, basketball, and maybe soccer as the big three. Sure, you can run cross country, maybe play tennis, but down on the lower rungs of high school competition (in terms of general visibility) is the wrestling team. Unlike the big three, it’s harder to market because it’s a team sport executed against the competition one-on-one. Doesn’t matter how well you practice with your teammates, once you step out on the mat, headgear on, it’s just you and them for three two-minute rounds or less. It requires endurance, strength, and a great deal of heart to compete, as well as a unique determination to keep going. Screening during the 2024 Santa Barbara International Film Festival is filmmaker Marco Ricci’s (The Reconstruction of Asa Carter) latest project, the documentary Lucha: A Wrestling Tale, a film that follows two seasons of the Taft High School women’s wrestling team in the Bronx in New York, led by Coach Josh Lee and Coach Robert Carrillo of the Lucha Vida program.
Alba Ciprian and the coaches. Photo courtesy of Wrestle Life LLC.
Though there are several young women on the team, Ricci narrows the focus down to five who we get to know in varying capacities: Shirley Paulino, Nyasia Jennings, Alba Ciprian, Mariam Sillah, and Shakye Ford. They each attend Taft and seek to excel at their craft, though for varying reasons. Some see wrestling as an outlet for energy or frustration, some see it as an opportunity to do something significant, some come to see it as a way to engage with American culture. This being set in the South Bronx and in high school, there’s a bit of overlap with each of these stories, though none shed their uniqueness. Using a cinéma vérité shooting style, Ricci and his team bring audiences into the world of these five athletes, sharing in their challenges, their victories, and their failures. By its end, win, lose, or draw, you’ll find yourself on your feet rooting for each one of them and their teammates.
Shakye Ford pins opponent. Photo courtesy of Wrestle Life LLC.
As a documentary, Lucha shares a lot more in common with Rocky (1976) than it does other recent docs (and fellow SBIFF releases) The Movie Man (2024) or Madu (2024). Ricci and cinematographer Mauricio Vasquez (Lee Fields: Faithful Man) don’t lean on the typical talking head interviews or “man on the street” type of conversations, appearing, instead, to capture events as they happen, observing as impartially as possible, even when the subjects are speaking directly to the camera. What this means is that very little is explained beyond what is common for the subjects, an aspect which may make those without any kind of wrestling background (and I don’t mean strictly WWE) from understanding everything as deeply as one might otherwise. There’s no explanation of the rules, no breakdown of the terms, no foundation set for audiences to understand the equipment or anything else; instead, we’re thrown into things and are expected to catch up. This isn’t so much a problem for general audiences as the mechanics aren’t the important part, it’s the tenacity of the individual players, their commit to wrestling, and the challenges each have to overcome to compete. Because of the embed-feel of Lucha, whether one understands the procedure of winning the match rapidly grows less important than whether or not Shirley has a place to sleep at night, how Alba overcomes missing practice so frequently due to familial responsibilities tied to being newly-immigrated, or if Nyasia will take steps beyond talking and into action in order to achieve her athletic dreams. These things, the trials outside of the mat, are far more important than whether or not they win in competition (though that feeling of winning is sweet) because life and wrestling share a similar tension — you only get out what you put in and, in most cases, it’s up to you alone to solve the problem you’re facing. Often times wrestling is a lonely sport because you’re on your own against an opponent, but Ricci ensures that the home-viewing audience can tell that this team has all the support it can handle.
It’s not just the immersion to the team’s personal lives, it’s also the construction and presentation of the matches themselves that give Lucha a similar dramatic energy of a traditional sports narrative. In addition to using overlaid titles to let the audience know important information, like season number or what team Taft is facing, we also get the occasional update on their rankings as they update and other helpful pieces of information for what’s happening on screen. Later, in the last 30-45 mins of the film, Ricci shifts from a wordless score to using actual songs, amplifying the intensity of competition by giving it that sports montage feel. By the time we get that far into the 90-ish minute doc, we’re already profoundly invested in the wrestlers’ individual successes, making each one feel like a life-or-death battle, and these songs just put things over the top.
Shirley Paulino late at night. Photo courtesy of Wrestle Life LLC.
Speaking as someone with four years of experience on the mat between junior varsity and varsity (‘94 – ‘98) and all the years watching my older brothers wrestle, where I was vocally reacting to the early matches in season 1, by the individual competitions show in season 2, I was nearly on my feet and yelling. Stopped only by the fact that there was a sleeping child on the other side of my viewing wall.
Lucha doesn’t cover everything about the wrestling program at Taft. It doesn’t get into how the program was cancelled a few years into its start by Coach Lee and resurrected only because of help from loud voices of support. (A fact only discovered while doing research for this review.) It doesn’t get into the personal lives of all the team members or explore the coaches themselves, such as their careers, ideologies, or background. Lucha makes mention of a lot of things that other sports may not understand, like what it means to save the tape for the wrestling mat or practice in unusual places while other teams have designated areas (cafeteria for them; basketball court or dance room for me, back in the day), and how being on a wrestling team requires a level of creativity and fluidity for exercise and focus than most other sports. Though it doesn’t get into everything, what we do get is far richer as a result.
Nyasia Jennings pins opponent. Photo courtesy of Wrestle Life LLC.
“Lucha” translates to “fight” or “struggle,” and there’s not a single person on display in this film who doesn’t live up to that title. Win, lose, or draw: these wrestlers put it all on the mat and continually cycle those lessons into their lives and back to the mat again. Ricci’s focus on the sport as it relates to the players he follows and what how they react to the challenges places before them make the entire watch far more compelling than if Lucha were to follow the expected path.
Screening during Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2024.
Available on VOD and digital November 11th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Lucha: A Wrestling Tale website.
Final Score: 4.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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