How“ Rez Ball ”brings Indigenous authenticity to the “Friday Night Lights”-inspired sports drama

Filmmaker Sydney Freeland ("Reservation Dogs," "Echo") gives a play-by-play of her coming-of-age Netflix film produced by LeBron James.

When filmmaker Sydney Freeland was a senior at Navajo Prep in her native New Mexico, she and the rest of her basketball comrades were en route to compete in the district tournament when their bus hit a flat.

“The bus pulled over, everyone sat up, very somber, very serious, and then our assistant coach was like, ‘Everyone off the bus, off the bus, off the bus,’” Freeland, now several years removed from those days, recalls to Entertainment Weekly. “We circle up outside the bus while the driver's repairing it off to the side [and coach said], ‘The rival team, they put a hex on us, and it caused our tire to go flat. So you got to bless yourself [for] protection.’”

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Those are the memories and cultural specificity that the filmmaker netted for her new sports drama, Rez Ball, out now on Netflix. The coming-of-age film centers on the Chuska Warriors, a Native American high school boys basketball team in New Mexico faced with the sudden death of their star player. With the state championship looming and a second chance at redemption against a group of rival white boys who can jump, the group led by team leader Jimmy (Kauchani Bratt) must unite through their grief to take home the win.

A loose adaptation of journalist Michael Powell’s Canyon Dreams, Freeland and co-writer Sterlin Harjo, whom she worked with on the Emmy-nominated Reservation Dogs, drew from their own experiences to infuse authenticity into a story initially told from an outsider’s perspective. Basketball is huge in Indigenous communities, and Freeland has described the drama as the 2004 film Friday Night Lights (she hasn't seen the TV series) as told from an Indigenous perspective.

“That movie was a big influence for us,” she says. “I think basketball has become the new national pastime, and that falls within Native communities as well.”

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The first step was drafting a group of teens who could actually play ball, which amounted to casting first-time actors. With help from acting coach Noëlle Gentile, the team was able to tap into some of the film's darker themes, which, in some cases, involved accessing "real trauma that the kids had experienced,” says Freeland. “And Noëlle, aside from being an outstanding coach, would stay behind after we would do a very emotionally intense scene and lead the kids in a guided meditation to come back down. That really allowed us to create a support system for our kids.”

It helped, too, that the first-timers were anchored by a stellar supporting team of seasoned actors, including an affecting Julia Jones as Gloria, Jimmy’s disillusioned mother struggling with sobriety, and Dallas Goldtooth as Henry, an upbeat play-by-play announcer. Another full-court advantage? The movie counts NBA star LeBron James as a producer via his SpringHill Entertainment production company. Freeland says the Los Angeles Lakers player was instrumental in helping deliver authenticity.

“One of the big things that was really helpful that I didn't even think to look out for is that LeBron shared the movie with Adam Amin, an ESPN play-by-play call announcer who does NBA games for both TV and radio, and Adam responded positively to the film,” recounts Freeland. “So Adam went through all of the games in the movie and did play-by-play calls as if he was announcing them himself. We were able to give that to our announcer characters as a guide track to use. It added this little extra layer of authenticity to the film.”

All roads lead to the big state championship, where Freeland scored another slam dunk: the pre-production schedule perfectly aligned with an actual 2023 state tournament. "There were two rez girls teams on opposite ends of the tournament bracket, and I was hoping they would both win so they would meet in the championship," she says. "And thankfully, that happened. All of those shots that you see of the crowded stadium and packed seats, that’s the actual rez ball championship game between Gallup High School and Kirtland Central."

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It's during the big game that the film's themes of resilience and grief meet on the court. Rez Ball, says Freeland, is ultimately about "processing and overcoming grief, and not allowing it to define you. There's no right way to grieve. There's laughter, tears, there's good and bad times, but if we can stick together, we can overcome and persevere."

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.