I Am Yup'ik
Toksook Bay, Alaska sits on the Bering Sea coast, and this short film follows the Yup'ik high school basketball team that has become one of the village's fiercest points of pride. Games are held in a gym that doubles as a community gathering hall, and players describe basketball less as a sport than as an extension of the discipline their elders demand for hunting and fishing on the tundra. Interviews with coaches, players, and elders trace how subsistence skills like butchering seal or reading ice conditions get passed down alongside jump shots and defense drills, with the film arguing both depend on patience, teamwork, and respect for people who came before. Footage moves between practice sessions, home life, and the frozen landscape surrounding the village, showing a community where language, food, and basketball are treated as parts of the same inheritance. The film stays local and specific rather than making a general argument about Native American life, letting one village's team stand for the larger question of what gets remembered and what gets lost.