TIFF25: “Origin: The Story of the Basketball Africa League” is a Slam Dunk
Basketball is one of the dominant sports in the United States. The National Basketball Association (NBA) has teams and players that are known around the world. You could travel to the edges of the Earth and find someone wearing a Lakers jersey or Air Jordans. Basketball is played on a professional level in many countries, but the NBA is still seen as the end goal. And in order to make the NBA the best it can be, there has to be a more global approach to talent development. In the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival world-premiering television series, Origin: The Story of the Basketball Africa League, viewers are shown the beginnings of an unprecedented NBA-backed league and the road taken to get there.
The Basketball Africa League (BAL) had the unfortunate luck of officially beginning in 2021, but it was at least a decade in the making. BAL is the brainchild of Masai Ujiri, Amadou Gallo Fall, and countless others who have worked to develop basketball in Africa. The series documents the inaugural season, where the top 12 club teams from across the continent participate in a tournament in Rwanda in the newly-built Kigali Arena. The original plan was to have games take place in multiple cities, but COVID restrictions necessitated a single setting to create a bubble. The first two episodes of Origin were screened as part of the festival, and primarily broke down how this league came to be and the structure of the tournament.
courtesy of TIFF
The balance that exists within Origin is quite intricate. This docuseries has to be part sports drama, part history lesson, and part introduction to the continent of Africa. As the filmmakers addressed in the post-screening Q&A, many people only think of safaris when they think of Africa. Some even think it’s a country, but Origin is a celebration of the different countries that make up the continent. The series introduces us to the teams competing in the tournament and a standout player or two. Through this personal lens, the audience is guided to hometowns across the continent. From Senegal to Rwanda to Angola to Egypt, each team has its own cultures, struggles, and pride. This is what basketball is all about. People who come from hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away to compete in a common language. Sports is one of the only things on the planet that allows this kind of accessibility, where language plays a small role. Even film needs those little one-inch subtitles to transcend its boundaries. Sports do not. You just need the lines on the court and the ball in your hands and you can become a global traveler in an instant.
Origin is deeply informative, but it also offers the thrill of watching a compressed basketball tournament. The highlight reel that’s stitched together for each match-up is thrilling and looks like NBA clips with different jerseys. There’s nothing about the BAL that looks inferior, and that’s part of the point. In order to create a new league and make it a genuine source of regional pride and a real career option, a financial investment is required. We’re seeing it in real time in the United States with the long-awaited rise of the WNBA. Organizations can only go so far without an influx of capital to help them become self-sustainable. Origin seeks to capture BAL in its early phases, as a time capsule to return to in a few years and see how far it’s grown.
Before the world premiere at TIFF, Origin: The Story of the Basketball Africa League was sold to ESPN. The four-part series will now air on one of the largest sports platforms in the United States. This is the sort of meaningful investment these young leagues need. Origin is a basketball thrill ride whose players have so much heart that the excitement will surely inspire a similar enthusiasm in its viewers.
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