The idea to make this documentary first came to me while I was visiting Cameroon in 2004. I was invited to play in a pick-up game with some friends I had met in Yaoundé and gladly accepted. The group of guys I played with called themselves the "Veterans" because most of them were well past their athletic prime. Despite the low level of competition and the sub-par skill level, playing with the guys was a great experience. There was great camaraderie and the comfortable feeling that a player gets whenever he/she steps onto a court anywhere in the world. Playing in Cameroon was at once familiar and totally new. It was the new and different aspects of the experience that stayed with me as I returned home to Paris.

Shortly after that trip I began to work as a journalist for a monthly television show covering sports in Africa. Each month we would receive amateur videos from all over the continent, and we would turn them into a half-hour television show. Seeing those images from Rwanda, the Ivory Coast and Mozambique, from the Central African Republic, Morocco and Nigeria, I was convinced that the style of the game being played there was interesting enough and developing at a fast-enough pace that the little-known concept of basketball in Africa would not remain unknown for much longer. I wanted to document what was happening all across the continent to provide some sort of record that would show what the game of basketball in Africa looked like at that specific moment in time.

All I had to do then was convince someone else to go on this adventure with me. I found a willing partner in C'est à Voir Productions who set me up with some equipment and later found a French television channel willing to broadcast our film, and I recruited another crew member from among my closest friends to fill out the production team. That other person was my wife, Riamsara Knapp.

So with our two-person, husband-and-wife team (me behind the camera and Riamsara taking a crash course in sound engineering), we set off.

We traveled to Japan where we followed the Angolan, Nigerian and Senegalese National teams at the World Championships and learned where and how the African teams fit into the big basketball picture. We traveled to Senegal where players, coaches and administrators opened their homes to us and told us the story of basketball on the local level. In Angola we were made to feel part of the enormous basketball family that seemingly wills the National Team to championship titles year after year. And in South Africa we saw that we were not alone in recognizing the extent of what is going on with the sport on the African continent as we covered the ever-growing Basketball Without Borders camp and learned of the resources being poured into the development of the game.

We were just a small team hoping to learn a little more about how the game is played in a different part of the world, and we hope that this film is an accurate reflection of what we saw and what we learned. We also hope that everyone who sees it enjoys it learns a little something too.

- Eric Drury & Riamsara Knapp