Basketball is much more than a game in David Fine’s stirring documentary about an Iraqi women’s basketball team at the American University of Iraq – Sulaimani (AUIS) in Kurdistan. For the young women on the team, most of whom have never touched a basketball or been allowed to play any sport, it is a blissful release from the realities of a war-torn nation.

They come from all ethnicities and sects – Arab, Kurd, Christian, Sunni, Shiite – but the joy they discover in playing and the deep love they come to feel for the young Ameri- can man who coaches them reveals an Iraq united in a way we’ve never seen before.