"Does the anguished history of a people inspire future generations to achieve new heights or is it a millstone around one’s neck, ensuring a continued legacy of hardship and despair? For Shoni Schimmel, a top female high school basketball prospect who grew up on Oregon’s Umatilla Indian Reservation, that question is at the center of her quest to make it in a sport with few Native American participants.
Written and directed by Jonathan Hock (Through the Fire, 30 for 30), Off the Rez paints a deeply affecting portrait of Schimmel and her family as the fledgling star makes the move from the reservation to Portland, Ore., where she ascends to national stardom as a junior at Franklin High School.
“Shoni has been taught a lot of the history,” Lillian Moses, Shoni’s grandmother, says in one of the many one-on-one interviews threaded throughout the engaging film. “So when she plays, it’s almost like she plays for the Indian people, and she plays hard.”
Ancestral pride is often not a clear-cut matter, however, as the film’s most fascinating character, Shoni’s fiery mother, Ceci Moses, illustrates."
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Off the Rez: TV Review
(The Hollywood Reporter 5/13)
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