DOXA Documentary Film Festival’s Motion Pictures Film Series, with support from the DVBIA (Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association), is very happy to offer our second annual FREE outdoor summer screening at Robson Square (800 Robson Street, north steps) with an encore screening of Brent Hodge’s Pistol Shrimps!

A moribund women’s intramural basketball league in Los Angeles is the unlikely setting for a Hoosiers-style sports story, but stranger things have happened in the City of Angels. As actress and Shrimps team member Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation) explains in an interview with Jimmy Fallon: “We’re a really serious basketball team. We love to ball and we ball hard. No Haters allowed!” The rest of her team members aren’t quite so certain. For some, it’s a chance to do something they never got to do in high school, meaning play team sports. This is not your mama’s Hoop Dreams, or maybe it actually is.

Women with jobs, kids, and careers drop everything and pick up a rock (that’s basketball lingo, y’all). Soon enough, other teams get in on the action and immortal franchises like The Kimmy Dribblers, The She-Cago Bulls, The Space Glam, and The LA Nail Clippers are born. Brent Hodge’s light-hearted film packs a serious wallop, not unlike an elbow to the gut, by a particularly motivated Shrimp, driving for the hoop. With women’s sports relegated to the sidelines, the members of the Pistol Shrimps are the vanguard of a new wave in women’s amateur sports.