WNBA star Brittney Griner considers the Trump administration’s ongoing, increasingly aggressive ICE-led deportations, arrests and overall immigration strategy a “crime against humanity.”
The WNBA champion and three-time Olympic gold medalist stars in director Alex Stapleton’s new documentary “The Brittney Griner Story.” The doc, which premieres Tuesday at Sundance, recounts Griner’s early 2022 arrest by Russian customs officials for accidentally bringing a cannabis vape cartridge into the country and the 10 months she spent detained in a Russian prison, as well as the global efforts that were undertaken to ensure her release.
The film’s festival debut comes just a little over three years after Griner was released in Dec. 2022 from a Russian penal colony in a prisoner exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. It is also premiering at a time when concerns about ICE’s detainment practices in America are at an all-time high.
As protests continue on the wintery, frozen streets of Minnesota, where two Minneapolis residents have already been shot and killed during tense encounters with ICE and Border Patrol agents, Griner was asked about the turmoil and shared her thoughts on the subject in a Sundance conversation with TheWrap’s executive editor Adam Chitwood.
“At the end of the day, it just comes down to just being a good person,” Griner told TheWrap. “We are taking children. There’s facilities where it’s nothing but kids. You can hear them screaming and yelling when people go to try to get access to it, people that have never even been in these countries [they’re trying to send them to], and they’re getting deported into these horrible situations. It’s really sad.”
“This is something that I didn’t think that I would ever see in my own country,” Griner added. “I traveled abroad. I’ve been to a lot of different places. I’ve been detained. I never thought that this would be my reality in my own country, where it should not be the case. And then to justify the things and lie. It’s sad.”
It is partly because of the current unrest in America that Stapleton, for her part, believes now is the right time for “The Brittney Griner Story” to be released to audiences. “I feel like it is God’s timing for this story, for her story, to come out,” Stapleton told TheWrap. “Because now more than ever, people need to understand the blurred lines between what an authoritarian regime will do.”
“I think we need to understand how important it is to fight for our freedom,” Stapleton explained. “It’s important now more than ever, I think, for people to be in rooms like this, at festivals like this, to be in community, in real life, so that we understand that we are all humans, and that some of the evil that’s coming off of social media, it’s actually a very small group. I think that most of us believe in the power of good and the power of humanity, and so I hope that this film touches on some of those themes and gets people talking.”
“I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” Stapleton added, reflecting on the timing of this year’s Sundance Film Festival and the situation she and other filmmakers have found themselves in. “I think we feel guilty that we’re not out on the streets protesting, and we’ve all had to tell ourselves that our work is our protest.”
