(upbeat ambient music) - The opening night film at the 2024 Freep Film Festival, (tranquil ambient music) a documentary about a basketball program with a winning history that goes back 70 years.

The film, it's called "Rouge", as in River Rouge, a small town next to that big city of Detroit.

- There's 14 state championships on that wall.

That's what we play for.

(basketball bouncing) - This a fast break drill, this ain't a slow break drill.

- Rouge directed by local filmmaker Hamoody Jafaar.

- Yeah.

- How did you come across the story?

- I grew up in the down river area, and when I was growing up in the 90s, you know, I'm a child of immigrants, basketball was like, it was really a gateway for me, like to gain acceptance and friendships, and it taught me a lot as a young person.

(upbeat ambient music) And during that time, River Rouge High School was, in the late 90s, was the best basketball program around.

And I was, I looked up to Brent Darby, who was their best player at the time.

- [Announcer] Brent Darby, we said, is unstoppable with the ball.

- Brent Darby in the back of Jafaar's mind when in 2019 he was working on a short film hoping to profile Ypsilanti High School sensation, Imani Bates, who made the cover of Sports Illustrated.

- And we went to go film Imani Bates and we were denied access to his locker room that night.

And by default ended up in his opponent's locker room who was happened to be River Rouge.

In that moment, I realized that the late Brent Darby that I had looked up to when I was a kid, that his son was there in that locker room that night, which I didn't know, I didn't even know Brent had a son, to be honest.

- When he died, I was just thinking like, "Let me do something like that's gonna make him proud or something like that."

- I realized in that moment he was playing for his dad's coach, you know, he was kind of like discovered this father-son legacy story essentially.

And they went out and won that night and they beat Imani Bates and Ypsilanti Lincoln.

So at that point, I just was hooked, you know, I felt like whatever led me there, led me there and then I was just consumed.

(upbeat ambient music) - River Rouge, the winner.

- With Jafaar's dive into Rouge basketball came the discovery of the school's storied past.

- I grew up in the 60s.

If you like basketball, you knew three things, Boston Celtics, UCLA, and River Rouge, 'cause they were all the best.

- It's the gold standard of high school basketball in America.

It is the winningest program in the state of Michigan's history.

- You know, I fell down a rabbit hole of research, and discovered like the loft and green years of the late 40s, 50s, 60s, and early 90s.

(upbeat ambient music) - The bottom line is who won championships?

And nobody has done it like River Rouge has done it.

- And you realize it was this during segregated times, it was this integrative high school and they had accomplished when no other high school had ever accomplished on the hardwoods.

(upbeat ambient music) - Sometimes they say records are meant to be broken, that will never be broken.

(crowd cheering) - River Rouge was like one square mile and that's where all of the players came from.

So you know, one of the guys, Bill Kilgore, we interviewed him in the film and one of the lines he said was, "In River Rouge, when you're born in River Rouge, you're born with a basketball in your hands.

And if you're not born with it in your hands, eventually it lands in your hands, you know, by the age of two or three."

- A warrior, a champion, a Rouge Panther, he gonna live on every single game.

- (indistinct) - Rouge basketball history and more revealed within those walls just across from the high school, an old arena that seemed stuck in time.

For this film, a backdrop for decades of past athletes to share their memories.

- Which one we miss?

- My year, '72.

- Oh, '72.

Oh, what happened to that?

- I don't know.

- [Speaker] Must have fell off.

- It was a typical track town.

It was divided by the railroad tracks.

- Come downtown route, you would see white folks, otherwise in your neighborhood growing up, we had no white folks on that side of town.

(tranquil ambient music) - Well, there's also a building there, the place that they used to play basketball that's really kind of this other character in your film.

Talk about The Buck.

- The Buck gymnasium, it's such a, symbolically, it's such a beautiful representation of the entire story for all kinds of reasons.

(upbeat ambient music) - He would take the best five from each school, so that would be 20, starting in eighth grade, 10 white boys, 10 black boys.

- In 1958 when it opened, I mean, there was no other gymnasium like it.

And it was basically something that you'd see out of like colleges or universities, but they had it on the high school level because of the success they were having obviously in the late 40s into the early 50s.

(upbeat ambient music) - We were the first in the state to win the state championship as an all black school.

- All blacks, starting five you mean.

- Starting five, right.

Because Paul was one, but he was still the same color.

(both laughing) - And one of the first things that had to be cut from an overhead perspective was The Buck because of, you know, how much it costs to maintain.

(people cheering) - [Announcer Two] The rise the fall, and then there's the program today, the River Rouge Panthers winning again.

In Rouge we meet not just the players, but the support staff too.

- I'm in awe of the humanity of it.

I love every scene that the team managers squeak and CJ are in.

♪ Happy birthday to you - It offers an extension of how beautiful everyone's soul is within that community.

And those two are such a beautiful representation of that 'cause they're so loved and adored by everyone and you feel that every time you see them and feel them interacting with student athletes or the coaches or the parents.

- [Stephen] Then there's Coach LaMonte Stone.

- As a coach, I was gonna get this thing back to the state championship level.

(TV buzzing) - Six eight junior coached by LaMonte Stone.

- Team is extremely strong and they may be the best team in the state, and the Rivers Panthers have their work cut out for them.

As you see that guy right there, LaMonte Stone in his third year, who has done wonders with this River Rouge program.

- No, LaMonte is such a beautiful representation because he was a former student athlete that played for Coach Green.

(upbeat ambient music) - LaMonte Stone.

- That went on to become the program's coach in the 90s and reinstilled the glory essentially.

And then he went on to coach in college for 15 plus years, you know, after they won back-to-back State Championships in the late 90s, he also advanced in his coaching career.

And that was a big reason why the story made so much sense.

- You're called student athletes, not athletes, students, student athletes, the word student come before the athlete.

- When I connected those dots and realized that Coach Stone was back coaching at his alma mater, coaching Brent Darby's son, who was his best player.

I mean, you can't, I couldn't have scripted that.

- [Stephen] Stone leads the team on the way to another state championship, playoff is about to start, it's March, 2020.

Remember what happened then?

An outcome no one could have predicted, but well documented here.

- I think what's so unique about the present day story is it's an extension of a lot of different challenges that communities of color face, especially locally, Inkster High School being one of 'em, like neighboring communities that lost their high schools.

And River Rouge, there's a story about how they were ordered to have their doors shut down and they were on the list of schools to be shut down, they were with Inkster.

They had to reinvent themselves, you know, to even be able to survive, they obviously became an open enrollment school, but then they extended their bus routes out an hour just to be able to bring kids into the school district that needed school, but then obviously to increase their own student enrollment.

So to me it's a beautiful representation of, you know, how River Rouge always rises.

It's such a resilient place, you can't keep it down, you know, and I think that's obviously a beautiful representation of that.