The Queen of Basketball
2021 · 22m · USA
Directed by Ben Proudfoot
Genres: biography, documentary, sports
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Lusia 'Lucy' Harris — three-time national champion, 1976 Olympic silver medalist, and the only woman ever officially drafted by an NBA team — recounts her astonishing basketball career and the choice that took her off the court, in her own voice.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a sports doc to *show* you the glory—Proudfoot instead locks you in a room with Lucy Harris's voice and dares you to find the tragedy in what she *didn't* get to become, which is deeply strange and kind of brilliant.
A masterclass in restraint: the decision to let Harris's narration carry the entire emotional weight, without the usual ESPN montage machinery, places this squarely in the lineage of first-person documentaries that trust voice as pure cinema—formally ambitious in its refusal of spectacle.
The whole film pivots on one choice: letting Lucy's own words be the image, which means every inflection in her voice—the pauses, the matter-of-factness about heartbreak—becomes the craft itself, turning a invisibility problem into an intimate formal solution.
Reviews
Lucy's story was much more than just a basketball story, and Lucy far more than an elite athlete and pioneer, but a gifted and open storyteller with a clarion memory.
Director Ben Proudfoot celebrates Harris in all the right ways.
Festivals
- Academy Awards 2022, Best Documentary Short Film (Winner)
- Tribeca Film Festival 2021
- Critics' Choice Documentary Awards 2021, Best Short Documentary (Winner)
- DOC NYC 2021