CONNECTICUT

Speaker/Performer: Introduction and discussion by Sarab Al Ani, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Yale UniversityDescription: Basketball is much more than a game in David Fine’s stirring documentary about an Iraqi women’s basketball team at the American University of Iraq—Sulaimani (AUIS) in Kurdistan. For the young women on the team, most of whom have never touched a basketball or been allowed to play sports at all before, it is a blissful escape from the realities of living in a war-torn nation.

The team members come from a variety of ethnicities and sects—Arab, Kurd, Christian, Sunni, Shiite—but the joy they discover in playing together and the deep love they come to feel for one another and for Ryan, their young American coach, reveals an Iraq united in a way we’ve rarely seen before.

Directed by David Fine (Iraq and USA, 2011)
In English, Arabic, and Kurdish with subtitles in English
Open To: General Public
Admission: Free
Sponsor(s):The Council on Middle East Studies at the MacMillan Center