PARIS — Filmmakers always look for built-in intrigue and drama when making a documentary. The Victoria production company, Banger Films, chronicling the Team Canada men’s basketball journey to and at the Paris Olympics have 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 today .
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 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.
“For us, Paris will be the final chapter, whatever the outcome. The better the result for Canada, the better the film.”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.