Starring: Director: Producer: Writer: Studio: Year: Genre: Rating: Runtime: Award:

Peter Coyote, Karen Allen Rich Cowan Rich Cowan Don Caron, Rich Cowan, Frank Swoboda, Tessa Swoboda North by Northwest Entertainment 1999 Drama PG 105 minutes 1999 Crystal Heart Award – Dramatic Feature

A picturesque Pacific Northwest community reeling from World War I sets the stage for this powerful film. When a new teacher comes to town, he creates a stir by introducing an unfamiliar game called basketball. Basketball, he reasons, is a metaphor for life and focuses on the necessity of teamwork. But the schoolhouse transforms from playground to social battleground when two young German immigrants move to town and start classes. These two new students face discrimination in a country that is at war with their native land, and what happens next sets a course for the future of the entire community. In a time of pain and prejudice, The Basket ultimately points to triumph and hope in a changing America.

Rich Cowan was in high school when he directed his first program at KING-TV, the NBC affiliate in Seattle, Washington. Over the next several years, he received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from Washington State University, and went to KHQ-TV in Spokane where he was a producer and director of newsmagazine segments, daily newscasts, documentaries, news specials and sports programming. In 1990, he left KHQ with two fellow employees to start North by Northwest Productions, a film and video production company located in Spokane and Boise, Idaho. As president of the company, Cowan helped develop the feature film division. The Basket is the first full-length feature he has ever directed.

Frank Swoboda is a writer, producer and director of nearly one hundred projects for the big and small screen. Swoboda has been with North by Northwest Productions since 1992, where he worked on everything from 30-second commercials, to long form industrial videos, to feature films. He recently wrote, produced and directed Safe Passage, an award-winning water safety adventure story for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that has been adopted as the national safety curriculum for every elementary school in the United States. A graduate of Gonzaga University, Swoboda was also an association producer, second-unit director and associate editor of The Basket. He co-wrote The Basket with his wife, Tessa.

Tessa Swoboda is a writer, artist, production designer, art director, landscape gardener, interior designer and mother. As an accomplished production designer for North by Northwest Productions, she balances her time between art direction for award-winning television commercials with her budding career as an interior designer, and the care of her three-year-old son, Nicholas. A graduate of Washington State University, she now lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband Frank, co-writer of The Basket, and Nicholas.


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