“They came between us and our guy, and that was wrong.”
That’s how Dallas Mavericks fan Susan Welch succinctly sums up everything wrong with the Luka Doncic trade in a new short film, MFFL. Directed by local filmmaker Sai Selvarajan, the film recently premiered at the Oak Cliff Film Festival. Selvarajan has written and directed numerous short films including the 2021 SXSW Film Festival World Premiere of The Unlikely Fan, and won a Special Jury Recognition for Coup d’état Math at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. His latest short documentary We Clap for Airballs was licensed by Conde Nast and was personally chosen by LeBron James to screen at his Uninterrupted Film Festival.
Selvarajan has been a Mavericks fan since Jason Kidd’s first stint with Dallas back in the nineties. An award-winning filmmaker who’s obsessed with the Mavericks is the perfect person to put together an account of how Nico Harrison dealing Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers rocked the fanbase, as well as the sports world in general.
Instead of gathering a large sampling of fans’ stories, Selvarajan chose to anchor the film on Welch’s experience. She explains how she became a Mavericks fan, what the team means to her, and how the trade made her feel. The singular focus on Welch was a bold choice, and one that pays off. She’s the perfect voice for Mavs fans who invested so much into the team, only to have a homegrown superstar shipped out in the dark of the night.
“One thing I really like about Dallas sports is it brings people together from all walks of life,” Welch says at one point in the film. Selvarajan does a great job of illustrating how the Luka trade brought Mavericks fans together, but this time in grief and anger, instead of shared joy over basketball.
In less than ten minutes, MFFL captures the mood of an entire fanbase in the aftermath of one of the most lopsided and inexplicable trades in sports history. Selvarajan perfectly weaves together the incredulity of the national media with the shock and rage of Dallas fans in a narrative that will be important for fans of the NBA in the future.
“I just wanted to capture this period of Mavs fandom in a jar,” Selvarajan recently told me over the phone. “I just wanted to capture it so we never forgot this confusion, this sadness, this anger.”
MFFL does that and more, with scenes from the protests, clips from NBA podcasts, and the superb testimony of Welch. If someone asks you what it was like in Dallas in the days and weeks after Luka Doncic was traded, you can simply point them to Selvarajan’s film.