Stories about small-town sports teams that face incredible odds are Hollywood staples (think Remember the Titans and Hoosiers), but there’s no script in the sports documentary Medora. The film follows a luckless Indiana high school basketball team. After losing all 22 of its games the previous year, the team begins a new season hoping for at least one win. Director Davy Rothbart — who moved to Medora for a year with co-director Andrew Cohn — told MSNBC that [in] “most sports documentaries, they’re trying to win the championship. This one is a team trying to win one single game.”
The team members struggle to bring some hope back to a city that many people view as a “meth-head town full of drug addicts and drunks,” while navigating their own complex teenage lives. The team’s troubles become a metaphor for the town’s bleak future.
6 p.m. Houston Public Library/Central, 500 McKinney. For information, call 713-748-8888 or visit houstonpbs.org. Free.
Wed., April 23, 6 p.m., 2014
This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2014.
