A visual love letter to NYC playground basketball
From K1X and French photographer/streetball documentarist Kévin Couliau comes a beautiful video for Red Cafe’s track “Heart & Soul” that doubles as an ode to the mecca of basketball, New York City.
The clip features action from K1X affiliated tournaments in Harlem (“Together We Chill” and “Kingdome Classic”) and the Lower East Side (“Lower Manhattan Classic”), but it would do the film injustice to dismiss it as just another commercial for a sneaker company.
It is far more than that, it’s NYC streetball in a nutshell: We are introduced to some of the protagonists of the Big Apple’s basketball scene and its courts (“The Cage” and “Goat Park”, among others). Couliau’s camera accurately captures each playground’s unique “personality”, and by embedding the action into images of the locals, the nightlife, subway stations, traffic and corner stores, we are reminded that New York streetball is simply inseparable from the city, its people and history (such as 9/11, symbolized by a fire station). Read the rest of this entry.
