Six-time WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner couldn’t wait to tell her story.
Four years after her release from a Russian penal colony, her documentary “The Brittney Griner Story” will have its world premiere Tuesday at Sundance, as part of the Premieres section. The film covers her 10-month detention and the efforts that got her home while also chronicling her life and rise to basketball fame.
“I wanted to open it up quickly rather than later,” Griner told TheWrap’s executive editor Adam Chitwood at the festival. “I wanted people to see the raw emotions of coming back, the things that I had to deal with, on top of just being educated and learning about my story and not letting time go by.”
Griner was arrested in Russia on Feb. 17, 2022, for accidentally bringing a cannabis vape cartridge into the country. She was convicted that August and was sentenced to nine years in prison. Once she got back stateside, Griner acted fast because misinformation was spreading.
“There were so many opinions around it, and people had false information and didn’t understand it’s kind of complex,” she said. “So I just felt like it was the right time to do it right then, especially with everything that’s going on now, present day, it just seemed like the right time.”
Director Alexandria Stapleton further noted that their first dinner together showed her they needed to set the record straight.
“It was really important in that conversation that they conveyed to me that the film needed to open up and to give context to so much of her story, and to hopefully make sure that Americans understood the story in a deeper way,” Stapleton said.
One persistent misconception involved the headlines themselves, which claimed she was “smuggling large amounts” when “it’s the smallest amount, and it wasn’t done on purpose,” Griner said.
“That headline, somebody will read it like, ‘Oh, did you hear about that basketball player smuggling? Yeah, these basketball players, they think they can do whatever they want,’” she added. “And then you see how that goes, and then it becomes this big thing when it’s based off of a headline and not facts.”
The documentary also served an unexpected therapeutic purpose as Griner struggled to find appropriate counseling for her specific trauma. “Trying to find counseling for being detained in a Russian prison is kind of hard when you type that in Google,” she shared, acknowledging that the making of the documentary helped her process her imprisonment. “All the programs I kept finding was like AA or NA, and I’m just like, that’s not my problem.”
Ultimately, the film helped her heal, though talking to family was hard as she could see how much it hurt them. “I didn’t want to see the hurt on their faces, seeing me, the age on my dad’s face and my mom’s face, that was tough,” Griner said.
“Being able to talk and get it out, and like, we would talk, we would cut and keep talking,” she said of the process of making the documentary. “I realized, well, no, actually not being able to bathe and not having food, that wasn’t OK, that wasn’t something to laugh about. I was able to feel it and process it. So it was very healing to make this film and heal at the same time.”
Despite the fact that her words seem to be a lightning rod for some media outlets, Griner said she won’t stop speaking out, no matter the criticism. “I’ll never get silenced,” she said. “Ancestors fought too hard to be silent.”
