PARIS — Filmmakers always look for built-in intrigue and drama when making a documentary. Victoria production company Banger Films, chronicling the Team Canada men’s basketball journey to and at the Paris Olympics, has certainly been given a dramatic storyline.
Canada has drawn host France with NBA rookie-of-the-year Victor Wembanyama and NBA veterans Rudy Gobert, Evan Fournier, Nicolas Batum and Bilal Coulibaly in the quarter-finals Tuesday (9 a.m. PT). That’s the way the brackets bounce as they gave Canada no breaks despite it going 3-0 and winning its group.
The film project began when Victoria earned the right to host the qualifying tournament for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, only to see the pandemic spread across the globe and delay the Games to 2021, without fans allowed in the venues. The film project took another stunning detour when Canada was upset by the Czech Republic in the qualifying tournament at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre. Yet that provided the basis for a compelling revenge plotline en route to the Paris Olympics.
Banger Films producer Nick Blasko and director Sam Dunn, both from Victoria, sent a film crew to Asia last fall to document the NBA-dominated Canadian team in the 2023 FIBA World Cup, where it won the bronze medal, and qualified automatically for the 2024 Paris Summer Games without having to go through another last-chance qualifier like the one in Victoria for benighted Tokyo 2020/2021.
The film crew went to Las Vegas last month for footage of the pre-Games exhibition game against the U.S. Dream Team and was in Lille, France, for Canada’s three opening group stage wins of the 2024 Olympics. The Victoria crew will be in Paris today as the quarter-finals open at Bercy Arena, along the Seine, in what will be a passionate and deafening din amid booming chants of “Allez Les Bleus” as Wembanyama, Gobert, Fournier and Batum try to keep their host-nation Olympic dream alive against Canada’s Golden Generation of NBA players. It’s an incredibly compelling match-up and the fervour of support for the French athletes has been a feature of these Olympics. But then again, the Langford-based Canadian women’s rugby sevens team managed to overcome it in a quarter-final victory over France at a howling Stade de France last week en route to the Olympic silver medal.
The thing with sports documentaries, meanwhile, is you don’t know how they will end. That’s up to the players on the day and the sporting gods. Victory today and the story continues, not only for the Canadian basketball team, but also for the documentary. A loss and it’s over for both — a wrenching ending for both the team and the film.
“Documentaries are a journey and you follow that journey to where it leads,” said Blasko, known for producing Rifflandia and other Victoria events.
“For us, Paris will be the final chapter, whatever the outcome. The better the result for Canada, the better the film.”
The untitled documentary will then be shopped for TV distribution and festival showings.
The director, Dunn, won a Gemini Award for Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey and also co-directed Grammy-nominated films Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage and Super Duper Alice Cooper. Dunn played basketball for the Vic High Totems and graduated in 1992, playing against two-time NBA MVP Steve Nash, who that year led the St. Michaels University School Blue Jags to the B.C. high school championship. Dunn quips he occasionally got lucky and put in some baskets.
In an eerie harbinger, Nash was the national-team captain the last time Canada played in the Olympic quarter-finals, at Sydney in 2000. The result was a gutting loss to — you guessed it — France and their NBA star of the time Tony Parker.
Dunn and Blasko, not to mention basketball fans across Canada, are hoping history doesn’t repeat itself this morning.
