Eau Claire filmmakers B.J. Hollars and Steve Dayton have teamed up to make a feature-length documentary about kubb, a Swedish lawn game with a major following in Wisconsin.
“Kings of Kubb” spotlights four champion players — three from Wisconsin and one from Minnesota — and follows the journey of Eric Anderson, a kubb enthusiast who started the U.S. National Kubb Championship in 2007. Anderson successfully petitioned city officials to designate Eau Claire as the “kubb capital of North America.”
“He was the person who brought this sport over from Sweden to America and, over the past 20 years, has just found a way to make this stick into our community’s lifeblood,” Hollars told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.”
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The game itself is relatively straightforward: Toss six wooden batons across an eight-meter pitch to knock down five wooden blocks (called “kubbs”) on the opposing team’s baseline. Once a baseline kubb is knocked down, it’s thrown back into the pitch to become a field kubb. To end the game, a team must knock down all the baseline and field kubbs, and then take out the king, a larger wooden block at the center of the pitch.
It may sound simple, but “over time, it kind of hooks you in,” Hollars said. And the beauty of the game is that anyone can play, he added.
“The first year we started filming, we actually saw a 103-year-old woman throw out the first baton to start a game,” Hollars said. “It was incredible.”
While the basic game is accessible for all ages and levels, for the champion players, kubb has taken on the qualities of an elite sport complete with training and strategy — fully embracing the game’s nickname, “Viking chess.”
To create the documentary, Hollars and Dayton spent two years interviewing kubb players, attending local leagues and watching the top teams prepare for the national championship, which brings people from around the world to Eau Claire every July.
Throughout the film, viewers get a feel for the texture of the game. While filming, Dayton made sure to record plenty of audio of the signature clinking sound when the baton makes contact with the wooden kubb, which one player in the film likened to the satisfying crack of a baseball bat.
“The first thing that you feel when you go out and watch kubb is just the sound and the noise that it makes,” Dayton said. “So we tried to capture the essence of it.”
For Dayton and Hollars, it was also important to convey the camaraderie they witnessed on and off the pitch. Trevor Bailey of Minnesota, one of the featured champions, calls his teammates his “kubb therapists” because they helped him get through a hard time in his personal life. Another interviewee said playing kubb elicits “the most hugs you will ever see in sports.”
“It’s about competition, but it’s about community more,” Hollars said. “Everyone calls the national championship their ‘family reunion.’”
“There’s so much that happens beyond the pitch, and that’s really what this film is all about,” he added.
“Kings of Kubb” is having its premiere screening at the Pablo Center in Eau Claire on April 30. After that, the film will play at Micon Cinemas in Eau Claire in early May, then head to La Crosse on May 22 for a screening at the Rivoli Theatre and Pizzeria.
