Sugar Movie

Sugar is a 2008 film directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. Sugar is about a young Dominican Baseball player named Miguel "Sugar" Santos, who is recruited to the United States to play baseball in the minor leagues. The film shows his struggles as he adjusts to American life and the temptations and pressures which inevitably come from playing baseball for a living. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008.

Ryan Fleck studied film at New York University and met Anna Boden on the set of a student film. Boden, at the time, was studying film at Columbia University. Romance blossomed between the two and after Fleck finished his thesis short Struggle, they decided to collaborate on their first film, a documentary short called Have You Seen This Man?, about an eccentric businessman who also tries to be an artist in New York. After the success of the project and the even more successful collaboration as a couple, the two wrote the fictional script Half Nelson. In order to raise funding for the film, the two shot a short based on the script called Gowanus, Brooklyn.

• "...with spring flowers busting out all over and Major League Baseball's opening day just around the corner comes the release of Sugar, a moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list. (After that comes Eight Men Out and Bull Durham, and then, hmm, I guess a few scenes from The Natural and A League of Their Own. And I refuse to go any deeper into the bullpen than that.)"—SalonSalon: Sugar: Best Baseball Movie Ever (April 3, 2009)

• "Sports is life writ large, the place where everything -- the triumph, the boredom, the despair -- gets magnified and scrutinized. The best films about sports, and the baseball-themed Sugar is surely one, understand that when a character says, "it's just a game, right?" the answer is both yes and no."—LA TimesLA Times: Review: Sugar (April 3, 2009)

• Algenis Perez Soto as Miguel Sugar Santos
• Alina Vargas as Reyna
• Ellary Porterfield as Anne Higgins
• Ann Whitney as Helen Higgins
• Andre Holland as Johnson
• Jaime Tirelli as Osvaldo
• Jose Rijo as Alvarez
• Michael Gaston as Stu Sutton
• Rayniel Rufino as Jorge Ramirez
• Richard Bull as Earl Higgins
• Kelvin Leonardo Garcia as Salvador
• Joendy Pena Brown as Marcos