Pistol Shrimps Got Game!
DOXA Documentary Film Festival’s Motion Pictures Film Series, with support from the DVBIA (Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association), is very happy to offer our second annual FREE outdoor summer screening at Robson Square with an encore screening of Brent Hodges Pistol Shrimps!
A moribund women’s intramural basketball league in Los Angeles is the unlikely setting for a Hoosiers-style sports story, but stranger things have happened in the City of Angels. As actress and Shrimps team member Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation) explains in an interview with Jimmy Fallon: “We’re a really serious basketball team. We love to ball and we ball hard. No Haters allowed!” The rest of her team members aren’t quite so certain. For some, it’s a chance to do something they never got to do in high school, meaning play team sports. This is not your mama’s Hoop Dreams, or maybe it actually is.
Women with jobs, kids, and careers drop everything and pick up a rock (that’s basketball lingo, y’all). Soon enough, other teams get in on the action and immortal franchises like The Kimmy Dribblers, The She-Cago Bulls, The Space Glam, and The LA Nail Clippers are born. Brent Hodge’s light-hearted film packs a serious wallop, not unlike an elbow to the gut, by a particularly motivated Shrimp, driving for the hoop. With women’s sports relegated to the sidelines, the members of the Pistol Shrimps are the vanguard of a new wave in women’s amateur sports.
“Don’t know a thing about basketball? Neither do the Shrimps—or more specifically, neither do their dedicated podcasters, who offer hilarious play-by-plays from the northwest corner of the gym. But [Director] Hodge delves into the lives of the league’s women with such spark that the points don’t really matter.” – The Georgia Straight
“The pistol shrimp is a ferocious creature the size of a human finger, armed with a deadly, oversized claw that functions like a handgun, sending tiny air bullets speeding at 60-plus miles per hour toward its victim. These Pistol Shrimps are 13 women on a rec league basketball team in Los Angeles. They, too, are fierce. They’re funny. They have their own dance team. And last season, they almost went undefeated.” – ESPN
For further information, call DOXA at 604-646-3200. DOXA is presented by The Documentary Media Society, a Vancouver-based non-profit, charitable society.
