When Brittney Griner was imprisoned in Russia on a trumped-up minor drug charge, the world looked very different. President Joe Biden was in office, Russia had yet to invade Ukraine, and ICE agents had not been unleashed on American cities.
Four years later, a movie about Griner is entering a universe in which all that has changed. But the WNBA star and global icon believes her story could still speak directly to the current state of affairs. Especially the ICE part.
“I hope this film can shed some light into what it could like if we keep letting this happen,” Griner tells The Hollywood Reporter, comparing her imprisonment in Russia to the ICE agents running through Minneapolis and other American cities. “Right now, we’re in a very bad place, especially with everything that’s going on in Minnesota and just across our country,” she adds. “I definitely think people will understand a little bit more now [when watching the film] and be able to see some comparisons.”
For anyone else making this equation, it could be derided as hyperbole. But Griner has serious bona fides, having spent nearly ten months in Russian prisons, much of it in a brutal penal colony, before being released in a prisoner swap with the United States. As Alexandra Stapleton’s new 30 for 30 documentary shows, those conditions went beyond even some of our worst imaginings, even as Griner’s fortitude in the face of them is equally impressive on the other side.
The Brittney Griner Story premieres at Sundance Tuesday afternoon ahead of an airing on ESPN later this year. Stapleton (she was behind the Netflix docuseries Sean Combs: The Reckoning) came to it, as she says ,“to give context to a story that was very two-dimensionalized in the media.” She proceeds to do that by showing details of Griner’s upbringing with a loving-but-stern Vietnam vet father, her long relationship with wife Cherelle, her seven-year career in Russia that preceded all this, and plenty of basketball details at Baylor and her two WNBA clubs.
But the political aspect was hard to deny, and is becoming, Stapleton believes, even more prominent, with a government on this side of the Atlantic also increasingly prosecuting and committing violence against innocent people.
“When we started, so much of BG’s story was still very foreign,” Stapleton says, speaking with Griner from Utah ahead of the premiere. “And now to rewatch it and be in the midst of everything that’s exploding in Minnesota and all throughout the United States, it’s crazy. I hope people can watch this story and see it as a cautionary tale … almost knock some sense into people.” She adds: “Hopefully this can be a film that can make a change.”
The movie also features an interview with former president Biden. Looking engaged and empathetic, he describes why he was so moved to try to make a deal to free Griner after Cherelle and Griner’s longtime manager Lindsay Kagawa Colas met for more than two hours with him at the White House. (It was supposed to be less than a half hour, but Biden kept the conversation going.) Griner calls him “definitely a personal hero of mine” and extols his empathy and humanity. Biden in the film delicately but pointedly describes his disappointment with the current nature of the discourse. He doesn’t mention President Donald Trump by name; he doesn’t have to.
Griner became a flash point for some loud voices on the right who tried to turn her story into something other than what it was: an American taken captive simply because of her name and the negotiating value she’d provide. They were particularly incensed she was being freed while Paul Whelan, a Marine veteran also imprisoned at the time, was not, even though as the film makes clear, Griner went out of her way in her letter to Biden from prison to ask for Whelan’s and others’ release too.
Griner says she’s able to tune out a lot of those voices, but admits it isn’t always easy. “I am human, and sometimes it gets me worked up, it makes me want to say something,” she says. “But at the same time, a lot of these people are just looking to get noticed in their mediocre lives, and they need a response from me or whoever they’re attacking to feel important, because they want to get their two seconds of fame. I try to do a good job ignoring it.”
Despite all the noise, Griner also says she maintains some optimism about the fight against ICE, particularly given how the grassroots movement on her behalf persuaded the U.S. government to make a deal.
“I hope people get the sense of, ‘when we come together we can stop what’s going on,’” she says. “We can change what’s going on right now in our country.”
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