Adi Weiss and Tomer Bar-Sadeh, two young students of the Film and Television School at Sapir College, chose to focus, for their final film project, on the moving personal story of Omer Weinbrand (11), who got Leukemia and whose dream was to become the world’s best soccer player, just like his idol, Lionel Messi.
The movie follows Omer on the first days of his return home, after a prolonged hospitalization at the Hemato-Oncology Department of Hadassah Medical Center in Ein Karem in Jerusalem.
Erez Meshulam, playwright and theatre director, visited Omer’s school class and developed, in collaboration with and thanks to the funding of the Israel Cancer Association, the “Maagalim Shkufim Shel Koah” (“Invisible Circles of Power”) program whose goal is to discover all of the focal points of power of the child and his family thereby finding an objective beyond the hospital bed.
Erez and Omer's class wrote a play together based upon the life story of the legendary soccer player Lionel Messi. The role of Messi was distributed to Omer who took an active part in the project. The project gave Omer strength and assembled all his friends around him, whom he missed a lot during his hospitalization.
The movie shows Omer's first steps towards recovery, his attempt to realize his dream and the power of human faith. The moving movie received media exposure on TV and in the newspapers and positive reviews at the Sapir College Film Festival in Sderot .
The movie "Hole Al Messi" ("I Will Be Like Messi") was then screened in the ICA Even Yehuda branch premises and was also attended by ICA's spokeswoman, Dr. Nava Cohen-Avigdor.
The two young filmmakers surprised Omer during the movie screening ceremony and bestowed him a FC Barcelona flag, signed by Messi, that had been sent to him personally from Spain.
Mr. Josep Guardiola, FC Barcelona's legendary coach visited Israel in June. Revital, Omer's mother, did not give up on Omer's dream and contacted the world-renowned singer Achinoam Nini (Noa), who happened to be a close friend of Mr. Guardiola and who hosted him during her concert in Jerusalem. Noa was touched by Omer's story and chose, out of thousands of calls of parents and children, to invite Omer to this specific concert and arrange a personal meeting with the coach.
After the meeting, Revital offered a copy of the movie "Hole Al Messi" to both Noa and the Josep Guardiola and, Omer was invited to Barcelona to attend a training session of his idol Messi at the FC Barcelona soccer club.