That Old Game La Crosse
2018 · 7m · Canada
Directed by JL Whitecrow
Genres: documentary, historical, sports
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
At the Fort Erie Native Friendship Centre, Haudenosaunee community members pass lacrosse — an ancient medicine game gifted, in tradition, by animals and birds — to young players as a means of cultural revival.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a sports doc about Indigenous reclamation to genuflect toward inspiration-porn sentimentality, but Whitecrow refuses that easy catharsis—there's a deliberate restraint here that lets the mythic weight of the game speak without commentary, which is genuinely rare.
The film positions lacrosse within both ceremonial lineage and present-day community practice with formal precision, letting the editing rhythms mirror the game's own structure while the mythological framing elevates what could be mere documentation into something approaching ritual cinema.
The choice to let the players' hands and the ball's movement carry the storytelling rather than rely on talking heads or voiceover narration transforms a seven-minute window into something that feels ancestral and urgent at once.