Tag: basketball

Rouge

Posted on by Paul Risker

In his director’s statement, Hamoody Jaafar says that real people, real places and real stories are the inspiration for his work. His basketball documentary, Rouge is an engaging story about the River Rouge High School Panthers – past and present.

Between 1954-72, the Panthers won a record 12 state championships under their legendary coach Lofton Greene. Now, former Panther player LaMonta Stone, returns to the once thriving industrial town of River Rouge, Michigan, seeking the school’s fifteenth state championship as its head coach. Rouge is as much about the personal journeys of its subjects, among them Seniors Brent Darby Jr. and Ahmoni Weston, and junior Legend Geeter, as it is about basketball and the dreams of its players who look ahead to their collegial future.

Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994), about the struggles of two inner-city Chicago high school teenage basketball players with aspirations of playing professional, and Jason Hehir’s The Last Dance (2020), chronicling Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bull’s 1997-1998 season campaign to win a sixth NBA title, are perhaps the two seminal basketball documentaries. Jaafar’s film struggles to escape these long shadows, but as if it were doggedly moving back and forth between offence and defence on the court, it captures something of Hoop Dreams and The Last Dance. There are the struggles the adolescent players must confront as student-athletes, and the pursuit to add to a legacy, that echoes both James and Hehir’s captivating real-life stories.

Jaafar’s directorial debut shows his deft touch at constructing layers of a story. He does this by identifying chapters in the story of the basketball programme, drawing out themes and ideas that contribute to a broader conversation. The first is emphasising the relationship between past and present, and the new generation of players that want to belong to the school’s storied history. It speaks to the natural desire in each of us to belong to something, which provides us with a sense of meaning and purpose. Only for these players, everything has to be earned. They must confront their vulnerabilities and the uncertainty of the future, even the outcome of each game they play on route to hopefully being one of the final two teams playing for a state championship.

The Michigan State Spartans University head basketball coach Tom Izzo offers some of the films most compelling contributions. He speaks about how sport at its best can break down boundaries and acknowledges Lofton Greene’s determined principle of setting aside racial politics in the segregated US to give those deserving the opportunity. Greene would select an all-five starting line-up of black players and would go on the record as saying he didn’t care about the colour of his players’ skin. Shining a light on these progressive actions during segregation and remembering someone that was ahead of their time sets Rouge aside as an important and necessary film.

Memory is a subject that Jaafar weaves throughout the film. Former players gather in the run-down gymnasium and its locker room, reminiscing about the past. The bonds of sweat spilled on the court transcend the years, as the audience witnesses the timeless connection these players share with one another. It calls to mind how the past never fades into obscurity as long as it’s alive in the memory. What Stone and his players, among them Darby Jr., Weston, and Geeter are trying to do is to keep the past alive and create new memories so that the River Rouge legacy endures for future generations.

One of the striking things about Rouge is how Jaafar immerses you in the real-life drama of Stone’s campaign to win the fifteenth state championship. He splices through time, creating music montages, picking out the on-court action and off-court conversations the audience need to see and hear. In the on-court action, one forgets they are watching a documentary and momentarily finds themselves perched on the edge of their seat in front of a live sporting event. Rouge effortlessly captures how the individual journeys intersect one another, emphasising that what’s special about team sports is that aside from the individual accolades, it’s the camaraderie of pursuing a common goal.

Rouge premieres at the Cleveland International Film Festival. It also shows at the Freep Film Festival.

Hoop Dreams

Posted on by victorfraga

Twenty-five year since its release, Hoop Dreams has lost neither its nuance nor its relevance. The basic structure of the film, its rise-and-fall-and-rise-again narrative retains a distinctive elegance. This is not just a film about two high-school basketball players hoping to make it to the NBA. This is a film about challenging race and class orthodoxies in the US. It’s a film about the place sport has in the imagination and dreams of millions of people around the globe. And it’s also a film about how human love and talent become exploited.

Director Steve James started filming William Gates and Arthur Agee more than 30 years ago. They were just smart teenagers who were good at basketball. Recruited by the fee-paying St. Joseph’s school, their families were informed that, so long as they played well, they wouldn’t have to pay. Eventually, Agee has to return to an underfunded inner-city school, and the two players undergo contrasting fortunes as the stars of their respective schools. Gates is the golden boy hailed by all, but gradually brought low by injuries. Agee is the underdog lifting an underperforming team above its weight.

The Wasp, puritan work ethics embodied by St. Joseph’s head coach, Gene Pingatore (who passed away just a few weeks ago), a serial winner and highly respected sports coach, is very questionable. It drains the love and passion out of the young players. He reduces the sport to a series of set plays in which there is only ever one right decision, and that is the one the coach wants you to make. Make the wrong one, and you’ll get a volley of verbal abuse. Such coaches want to be chess-masters, but there’s too much chaos in most team sports to guarantee that level of control. In my opinion, this method of coaching has spread to almost all professional sports.

Both Agee’s and Gates’ families look upon St. Joseph’s with hope, as a route out of inner city poverty. When Agee is dropped from St. Jo’s, he also has to contend with his father falling foul to drugs and the law, whilst his mother loses her income and goes on welfare. The sense of responsibility and pressure he must have felt at the time is enormous. Yet he tackles his problems effectively. He doesn’t emerge an outright victor, but he’s a fighter, and does his best to get through it.

Steve James seemed to instinctively understand this. The camera is patient. The time that the director spent building up a relationship with both families is crucial to the film’s success. This cosy relationship also extends to the viewers.

The basketball footage is riveting. Even though this is a 25-year-old film relaying results that are 30 years old, my palms were sweating as James’ narration takes us through the story of each individual game. The poetry of sport is pervasive. Chaos has a habit of creating unbelievable narratives, seeping into the collective folklore of mass history.

Let’s not forget, however, the dark forces behind these stories: the dirty money, the non-remunerated players, the international skulduggery, and so on. Hoop Dreams reveals that sports are a route out of poverty for many, but also a bumpy road filled with dangerous turns and lies. For coaches it remains a means to an end. Either you become a winner or you get out. For the institutions, there’s more money being funnelled into the game than ever before.

The two protagonists find a glimmer of hope in the end of the movie. Both Gates and Agee enter college, and they talk about their dreams. Five years earlier, they have said “NBA” without hesitation. Now, they’re not so sure. Basketball has given a scholarship into college, and with that the springboard to something a bit more stable, if not quite as opulent as the promised land of the NBA. The way they speak of it suggests that they feel a sense of relief, that a burden has been released. Perhaps NBA isn’t the only way forward!

Hoop Dreams showed at Cinema Rediscovered in Bristol, and it’s out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, October 25th. On Mubi in June, 2020.