“Growing up on the reservation, I never really felt like I saw myself reflected in film and television,” said Sydney Freeland, writer and director of “Rez Ball.”
The new Netflix film is a fictional portrayal of an underdog Navajo boys basketball team trying to win a state championship. NBA star LeBron James is the executive producer.
Freeland, who has written for the hit Hulu series “Reservation Dogs,” said basketball is a huge sport across reservations in the U.S. and Canada.
“I think the closest comparison that I can think of is West Texas high school football, you know, the whole town will shut down.”
Without professional or college sports teams — high school athletics become an important focal point for families and the community. Freeland said while they were filming, two girls teams from the Navajo Nation went to the New Mexico state championships — selling out a university arena in Albuquerque.
That passion was evident when production of the film got underway — as 5,000 people sought 10 roles for players in her film.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Pamela McCall: What impact did the production of Rez Ball have on the Indigenous actors involved?
Sydney Freeland: Those 10 players, they had to be able to act, they had to be able to play [basketball]. But more importantly, they were from the communities that they were portraying. And so they were all first-time actors. For a lot of them, it was their first time ever on a film set. And so from an acting standpoint, they didn’t have that experience, necessarily, but what they did have is that lived experience coming from Indigenous communities. It was just about encouraging them to access their own personal experiences.
PM: The story includes a tragic suicide that impacts the team. What drove that decision?
SF: Initially, there was a little bit of hesitation, of like, “Is this something we can or should be talking about?” But the more we talked about it, the more it was sort of like, “Well, yeah, if we’re kind of hesitant, maybe this is something that we need to bring up and bring to the forefront.” It’s something that affects a lot of tribes across the U.S. and Canada. Tribes are still dealing with a lot of intergenerational trauma, and there’s a number of different ways that people are trying to deal with that. Sadly, it’s something that affects a lot of Native American communities.
PM: The team’s coach in the movie is a former WNBA player. How does her experience play into the film’s dynamics?
SF: One of the things that we were really adamant about is that we didn’t want to have an outsider coming in to lead the kids. That led to the creation of coach Hobbs, who, herself, was also a player, she was also from the community, having her come in to lead the boys had all of these sort of positive consequences when the team faces adversity. For example, she’s not going to take them to the big city and a fine dining establishment and, you know, teach them how to use [a] salad fork, and so on and so forth. She’s going to take them to her grandmother’s sheep camp, where she grew up herding sheep, and she’s going to use that as a team-building exercise.
PM: How do Navajo traditions become part of the team’s journey from underdogs to champions?
SF: The culture and the tradition is sort of intertwined with life back home. I think one of the things we really wanted to show is that this is America, but it’s also not America. One fun example of that was actually when we were filming the national anthem. Originally as scripted, it just said, like, “the national anthem plays over the loudspeaker.”
And on the day when we were shooting, one of our players came up to me and he says, “Who’s going to sing the national anthem?”
And I said, “Well, no, we’ll probably put something in post-production and we’ll just pipe something in after the fact.”
And he said, “Well, you know, I sing national anthems at high school games back home. And do you want me to sing?”
I was like, “Well, yeah, but can you do it?” I’m like, zero warm-up and do it in like, one or two takes.
“Like, yeah, sure. Do you want me to sing in English or in Navajo?”
I remember thinking “Navajo will be awesome.” And so Jojo Jackson, our player, sang the anthem in Navajo, crushed it on zero warm-up. And that actually became this kind of happy accident. It became this great way of showing the audience that this is America, but it’s also not.
