PRETORIA, South Africa – There was a quick scene in the 2022 Disney movie Rise where a young Giannis Antetokounmpo was asked to pay a fee on a computer to use the internet at Amadou Café in Athens, Greece. Rise director Akin Omotoso told Basketball Africa League president Amadou Gallo Fall on March 8 that the fictional café was named in honor of him in the movie made about Milwaukee Bucks star and two of his brothers.
“Amadou, the Amadou Café that Giannis went to in Rise, I named it after you,” Omotoso told Fall during a lavish pre-party for the start of the 2024 BAL season in Johannesburg.
“Really? That was for me?” Fall asked.
Fall will have a much more prominent role in the upcoming documentary Origin: The Story of the Basketball Africa League. Omotoso is a co-executive producer, and Origin looks back at the history of the BAL, its first season and the complex basketball relationship between Africa and America. The BAL was founded in 2019 by the NBA and FIBA and started its fourth season March 9 with 12 qualified clubs from across Africa. The BAL is playing games in Pretoria; Dakar, Senegal; Cairo; and Kigali, Rwanda, this season.
The inaugural BAL season in 2020 was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic. It finally debuted in a private bubble form in 2021 in Kigali, with rapper J. Cole headlining the participants. J. Cole; former President Barack Obama, an NBA Africa strategic partner; Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry; Joakim Noah, a BAL investor and two-time NBA All-Star; Indiana Pacers center Pascal Siakam of Cameroon; NBA commissioner Adam Silver; and Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri of Nigeria, who is also a co-executive producer of Origin, are among those who are interviewed in the documentary.
“In curating our stories, you have to capture the beginning, because soon this will be a successful league,” Omotoso said from SunBet Arena during BAL play on Sunday. “You have to record it. Being involved in the documentary is really key for me. The doc was a lot of fun to make. It’s coming out soon. We don’t have a release date yet.
“It’s a beautiful documentary about this league, how it started during COVID and how they put it together. And also, just looking at the overview of basketball on this continent, the journey of Amadou and his team and just getting that first season out there.”
Akin Omotoso
Omotoso, a Nigerian, is also an actor, and he’s best known for directing Rise, Man on Ground (2011), Tell Me Sweet Something (2015) and Vaya (2016). He said he was terrible in soccer during his youth, and was inspired to start playing basketball after watching the film Michael Jordan: Come Fly with Me on VHS in 1989. Omotoso began following NBA players from Africa such as Hakeem Olajuwon, Manute Bol and Dikembe Mutombo.
“Growing up here, I always felt there was a lot of talent here in Africa,” Omotoso said. “But there is a lot of talent all over the world. When we were coming up, we would watch the games at 12 o’clock to 3 in the morning. Or we would put our VHS on to tape the games because of the time difference.”
After his family immigrated to South Africa as a teenager, he attended the University of Cape Town to study speech and drama and played college basketball. The basketball enthusiast wrote a column called Basketball is a Country for the website Africa is a Country in 2015. He interviewed Fall and Antetokounmpo. Omotoso also flew from Johannesburg to New York City in 2015 to attend NBA All-Star Weekend.
In April 2019, Omotoso was reading Sports Illustrated when he came upon a story on Antetokounmpo’s challenging road to NBA stardom from a Nigerian family in a racially challenged environment in Greece. The story mentioned plans for a movie about Antetokounmpo that would air on Disney+. Omotoso told his agent immediately that he wanted to direct the Antetokounmpo movie. He also kept Sports Illustrated next to his bed as motivation.
“I told my agent, ‘Whatever you do, you have to get me into that room, because I’ve been dreaming about a film like this,’ ” Omotoso said. “His story was just amazing to me. I had been thinking about it for so long.”
Omotoso landed an interview with Walt Disney Co. executives in the summer of 2020. He said he “pitched from the heart” his vision, his experience producing Vaya, the connection with his Nigerian roots and love of basketball.
“You basically go in to tell them why it has to be you,” Omotoso said. “I told them, ‘I love this game. This is my story. I moved from Nigeria. I understand the parallels, being in another country, what that means.’ ”
After Disney deliberated for seven weeks, on Sept. 18, 2020, Omotoso was chosen to direct Rise. Coincidentally, Antetokounmpo won his second NBA MVP award that day.
Omotoso recalls when Antetokounmpo his brother, Thanasis, and their mother Veronica came to the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California, on Feb. 7, 2022, during a Bucks road trip to watch an early cut of Rise. The two youngest Antetokounmpo brothers, Kostas and Alex, watched it simultaneously via streaming since they were both playing professionally overseas at the time. Omotoso said the Antetokounmpo family’s viewing was private. He believed he had won them over.
“It was a beautiful day,” Omotoso said. “They came on the lot and watched the film. It was just amazing because they were crying — Giannis, Thanasis and their mother. It was beautiful. That was the moment.
“It was such a beautiful process. I really loved the story. You’re always nervous. But we were such a community making that film that I was excited to show them.”
Akin Omotoso
The next day, Omotoso sat courtside at an NBA game for the first time with Walt Disney Pictures president Sean Bailey to watch the Bucks beat the host Los Angeles Lakers 131-116. Looking back, Antetokounmpo said, working with a fellow Nigerian made it comfortable to make the movie for his protective family.
“[He] was a great guy, man,” said Antetokounmpo, who signed the Sports Illustrated cover for Omotoso. “And he was telling me that he always wanted to make a movie about me and his dream came true. He had this newspaper when I got drafted 13th … This guy has been dreaming about doing a film on me since I was drafted from Greece. That’s a great story.
“ ‘I want to make a movie about him.’ And fast-forward 10 years later, his dream comes true. That was crazy.”
Omotoso said it was a “special moment” to attend the first BAL games in South Africa on March 9. He said Africans are undergoing a renaissance in sports, music and film.
“The thing about the BAL, knowing Amadou and what the vision was, the idea was having a league here with Africa’s top basketball players,” Omotoso said. “You can’t say there wasn’t a path. I met Amadou when he first set up the office and I remember him talking about his vision.
“The stories of African players on the continent have an opportunity to hopefully [show BAL to] be a long [living] league, [that] continues to innovate and do great things during formative years. That is why working on the Origin documentary was important as an executive producer to capture the beginning.”
