“Rez Ball” is no easy task, but in the end, Indigenous communities win

Aside from the obvious funding issues, it’s a wonder it took this long for an Indigenous basketball film to come to fruition because the idea was ripe for selection. Basketball is as deeply rooted in indigenous culture as football is in the South. Anyone familiar with Indigeneity will understand the meaning Rez Ball and its close connection with indigenous cultures in the United States. When I was a younger man playing basketball for my high school team in a Comanche community in Walters, Oklahoma, our coach scoffed at the way Comanche hoopers played. He dismissed the way we played as “Indian ball.” To him it was a derogatory term for a disorganized, faster style of basketball that lacked discipline, while I simply consider it a more entertaining way to play the game.

Smaller communities take great pride in their local sports teams, and this is especially true on the ground floor. For better or worse, these teams represent their communities. I always watch the 1986 film Hoosiers as a template for the exemplary small town basketball film. It successfully utilizes all the major sports tropes: small town pride, an unorthodox underdog team of misfits, a troubled coach who overcomes enormous obstacles to achieve a goal, and supporting characters and situations that help tell the story about it. how a team is created Access your own special power to become champions, using a power that players have had within them all along. Rez Ball is such a story.

Two of our best Indigenous filmmakers have teamed up with Netflix to create a basketball story that showcases the pride of Indigenous teams in our own small communities. Sydney Freeland (Navajo) and Sterlin Harjo (Seminole) tell the story of a Navajo Nation high school basketball team, the Chuska Warriors, and their arduous journey to the New Mexico State Championship. Jessica Matten (Red River Cree Metis) plays Heather Hobbs, a coach who struggles to focus on her team while maintaining a long-distance relationship with her partner, even as both the team and the relationship dissolve. Kauchani Bratt (Quechua/Coahuiltecan Nation) plays Jimmy Holiday, a rising star who must quickly step into the role of team captain after tragedy strikes the team. He lacks a good support system; His mother Gloria, played by Julia Jones, was a ballplayer in her youth but failed in college. Her dreams remained unfulfilled and she refused to attend her son’s games and struggled with alcoholism. There is a lot of tragedy Rez Balljust as is the case in real indigenous communities. The film deals with alcoholism and suicide and the deaths caused by them. Given these issues Rez Ball It may not sound like a family-friendly film, but it is. It carefully addresses these and other challenging issues facing Indian Country today, and in the end it is an inspiring story. Perhaps this is the hallmark of Indigenous filmmakers: they can tread this terrain and still create stories that help the community thrive. They refuse to simply wallow in trauma porn.

It can be challenging to create realistic-looking basketball sequences. The actors may not know the mechanics of proper shooting, dribbling and passing, skills that take years to perfect. But somehow Rez BallThe creative team managed to find actors who could actually act, or find decent players and train them to act. Whatever the case, they have credibility on the hardwood. The basketball scenes in small town gyms look real; Thanks to Jessica Baclesse’s clever editing, the players move elegantly. The scenes slow down and then speed up to show us the players’ skills, accompanied by a modern hip-hop soundtrack – provided by Indigenous musicians Halluci Nation and Travis Thompson – that contributes to the film’s youthful tone. When players aren’t yelling at each other and overcoming their own obstacles on the way to building team chemistry, they look like they’re having a lot of fun on the court.

Perhaps this is the hallmark of Indigenous filmmakers: they can tread this terrain and still create stories that help the community thrive. They refuse to simply wallow in trauma porn.

Sports films traditionally have a memorable scene with an unorthodox, teachable moment, a way to teach a person to do something they don’t yet understand. In The Karate KidFor example, when Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel LaRusso to “paint the fence,” he is actually teaching him karate moves that will serve him well down the line. There’s a great scene Rez Ball that reflects this. Coach Hobbs decides to take her team on a surprise trip to her grandmother’s homestead, where she assigns them the job of herding sheep. It’s a team-building exercise designed to help their players find the chemistry they need; As a coach and former player, Hobbs knows that chemistry cannot be forced, only discovered. It’s a highly entertaining scene that draws on Diné culture and language as the team members are forced to use teamwork, creativity and ingenuity to complete their mission. Together they learn the skills required for successful team basketball. The boys begin to integrate their culture into their basketball lives and discover that they have much more in common than they realized. They learn that if they want to win, they have to work together.

Since this is an indigenous film, there are bound to be comedic moments. Navajo comedian Ernie Tsosie delivers some of these in his role as assistant coach Benny Begay. His one-liners are sharp; The largely Navajo audience with whom I saw the film at a special Netflix screening in Albuquerque laughed enthusiastically at its jokes, many of which were in Diné. However, his character isn’t introduced until the beginning of the second act, and I felt he was underused. I wish we saw more of him because the character is charming and brings an added element of Diné humor. More successful is the use of Cody Lighting (Cree) and Dallas Goldtooth (Dakota/Dine), who play local radio sports announcers for the radio station KTNN, a real Navajo radio station. Their comedic sports commentary helps move the film along as they narrate what’s happening on the field. At the other end of the comedic spectrum, Jimmy Holiday’s mother seems unrelentingly dark upon introduction and remains something of a buzzkill throughout. By the end of the film we understand why Gloria is like that and why she doesn’t support her son’s dreams, but by then her character has almost become too unlikeable to make up for.

I wouldn’t say it Rez Ball in the same category as Hoosiers. It wouldn’t be fair, and it probably doesn’t mean to be; Rez Ball has no access to Gene Hackman in his prime or Dennis Hopper. What it is, however, is a breakthrough in the genre: an Indigenous, family-friendly basketball film written and directed by Indigenous people. This is not an easy task. Plus, Rez Ball aims for a different goal than Hoosiersand tells the story of a contemporary Indigenous basketball team from a contemporary Indigenous perspective. It tells a more modern, flashier, and overall much bigger story about underdogs, not just the story of a small-town team taking on big-city rivals. It is a story of indigenous peoples overcoming our trauma, our lack of support systems, our doubts and fears, and choosing to take the risk to achieve excellence – and choosing to believe that they are ultimately Indian may win in the end.

Editor’s note: Rez Ball is playing in select theaters and streaming worldwide on Netflix on September 27th.