The Metlakatla Chiefs boys basketball team played at Mt. Edgecumbe in February 2018, one of the scenes from the documentary film "Alaskan Nets" that is coming to Wrangell on March 5.
An award-winning film chronicling the Metlakatla boys basketball team's run to the 2018 state championship will make its Wrangell screening debut next month.
"Alaskan Nets" plays at 6 p.m. Saturday, March 5, at the Nolan Center. Tickets are $20.
Californian Jeff Harasimowicz, director and producer of the documentary film, said he got the idea in 2017 when he was scrolling sports stories, which he loves, on ESPN.com and came across a 2016 photo story by photojournalist Samuel Wilson about the Metlakatla Chiefs 2015-2016 season - their runs to basketball games on the state ferries or by plane, sleeping on air mattresses in churches and classrooms which doubled as locker rooms before away games.
"The fact that basketball is so big there caught me by surprise," he said. Finding out there were a lot of kids who were also commercial fisherman there, and that it was Alaska's only Native reserve, in a community settled by the Tsimshians, surprised him, too.
Together with his production partner Ryan Welch at AO Films, Harasimowicz followed the players on the road to their 2017-2018 season as they pursued a state championship 34 years since their last one, and only the second in school history.
Deciding to make the investment in chronicling their journey took a leap of faith, he said, because there was no guarantee they'd make it to the state championship. That's the risk of documentary filmmaking – the outcome is unscripted. In talking with Metlakatla coach TJ Scott, he learned Unalaska was their most formidable rival, and sure enough, the team went up against Unalaska for the championship.
Alaska Airlines and GCI are sponsoring a nationwide high school screening tour of the film, where any high school can host a screening for free through March, before the film is released. Schools can sell tickets, school merchandise, concessions or raffle tickets, and 100% of the money they raise goes to the school's athletic department.
The proceeds from the March 5 screening will be split between the Wrangell boys and girls basketball teams, Trisa Rooney, Wrangell high school and middle school activities director, said Feb. 15. Everyone who buys a ticket will be entered into a drawing for two Alaska Airlines' tickets, Rooney said.
Tickets are available from any basketball player or coach, or by calling 907-305-0576.
More than 30 communities in Alaska are screening the movie, according to the film's website.
The film is "exciting for Alaska and the schools that play Metlakatla yearly," Rooney said. There were a couple of Wrangell seniors who graduated last year that played against Metlakatla for the season chronicled in the documentary, she said.
Harasimowicz, who founded the production company Raised by Wolves and made his directing debut with the basketball film, said he was "woefully unprepared" for the toll traveling across Southeast with the team would take on his adult body. He wanted to travel light, so he brought a small sleeping pad and few clothes. The boys ended up taking him to the general store in Petersburg to show him what to get. His wife mailed him an air mattress.
Wherever the kids traveled, he went too, sleeping on the floor of schools and churches that put them up during the season. "I got really sick when we were traveling to Craig for an away game," he said. The boys were fine, though. "I was still on death's door sleeping on the floor of the library," he said, while classes were going on around him. "It was humbling, as a filmmaker."
The film won the 2021 Audience Choice Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, the festival's top overall award.
After the film was cut and edited, Harasimowicz started sending it out to people at United Talent Agency, his very first job in entertainment. "That is where I got my start in the film industry," he said. "I got a call from an agent who showed the film to Chris Pratt, who was also represented by the same agency."
Pratt, who spent a few years of his childhood in Kenai when his dad was in mining, was taken with the film, and decided his company, Indivisible Productions - homage to the Pledge of Allegiance - would pick it up. He served as executive producer.
"Like the basketball players in our doc, I know what it's like to live in a small town defined by high school sports and supported by local blue-collar industry. ... This wonderful doc examines how small town expectations can (put) the weight of the whole world on a young man's shoulders," Pratt wrote on Instagram March 23, 2021, ahead of the premiere at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.
For Wilson, the then-Ketchikan photojournalist who pitched the story to ESPN, it was a full circle moment, because it was his hope when covering the Chiefs for the 2015-2016 season that they would win. Wilson said he's pleased the filmmakers were inspired to tell the story in a respectful and collaborative way, and that the community wasn't being mined for their stories. "People are actually interested in them for who they are and what they're doing."
Any art, said Wilson, who now works as a photographer at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle in Montana, is inspired by something else. "To have introduced this community and way of life to a larger group of people, and given other people questions they wanted to answer as well is really important."
Harasimowicz said he hopes at schools all over, and for many of the kids in Wrangell, "Alaskan Nets" will strike close to home. "I imagine many of the adults in the movie, or their kids, will be friends with the kids in this film, and have experienced similar triumph. It's the story of many schools, in Wrangell and Alaska. I hope they enjoy it and see similarities in their own experience."
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