In 2005, I set out to make a film about people who use sports as a tool for the betterment of others. I'd been fascinated by the subject since my college days, when RC Buford, my older brother, served as assistant coach for the Kansas basketball team. People often think about sports in frivelous terms, but I saw in basketball a tool for people to empower themselves.

That year, my brother, now GM of the San Antonio Spurs, had introduced me to Amadou Gallo Fall. Amadou, a native of Senegal, was scouting director for the Dallas Mavericks. He is also the founder and visionary of a high school boarding academy in Senegal called SEEDS (Sports for Education and Economic Development in Senegal), where each year, two dozen boys study and train with the goal of using basketball as the means to furthering their education by earning scholarships to study in the U.S. The academy is the culmination of Amadou's life-long dream to empower young African men to create a better life for themselves through hard work, dedication and perseverance. Amadou, the most humble man I have ever met, was an inspiration and set me on my course.

Two weeks after meeting Amadou, I was on a plane to Africa with a film crew and 15 NBA scouts who had volunteered to support his mission by spending a week helping coach an annual basketball camp for SEEDS players. We were all impressed by the talent in abundance – I watch a kid who is 6'4 jump from the free throw line over a 7-footer and three others to dunk the ball. I returned home to New York with 50 hours of footage and the beginnings of my first feature-length documentary film. My goal was to make a film that would tansform perceptions of Africa, as Amadou had transformed mine.

Americans tend to view Africa through a distorted lens. When we think of Africa we think jungle, poverty, guns – a floundering continent. But I had on my hands a real story about men helping other men, about hope and opportunity, not pity. Through basketball these kids were learning life skills and earning their ticket to an education. That isn't to say that their journey was without trial. Following the boys' transition to America, it became clear that the process took its toll on them. In Africa, they had community, family and fluency with the language. In America they were foreigners, alone. One of the big questions of the film became: what are the trade-offs of going through this transition at a crucial juncture in their lives? The boys are proud and guarded against being perceived as weak, but there is no questioning the difficulties they faced along the way.

We were lucky to be granted an unusually intimate view of this process because of my brother's standing in the basketball community. From our first arrival in Senegal, we were treated like members of the NBA family, which made filming over these years a great deal easier. One of the challenges for a film with this kind of longevity is that people come in and out of the production. We developed a routine in Senegal that made it easy for new crew to fall into step – same hotel, same driver, same Senegalese sound man. It was very important to the locals that we see and depict the positive facets of their lives. They wanted us to like their country, not feel sorry for them. They wanted us to embrace the culture and the food. They wanted to show us how well Muslims and Christians are integrated there, even celebrating each other's holidays. People came to know us over time and wanted to work with us because we treated them with respect.

When you shoot over such a long period and you're capturing the fullness of these kids' experience, there's inevitably a lot of sitting and waiting. People get frustrated, they get tired. As a filmmaker you have to be in a constant state of readiness to capture things as they happen. The language barrier was also a major challenge – we'd do interviews and wouldn't know immediately what the answers were.

To our surprise, however, it turned out to be a lot easier to film in Senegal than in America. When the boys came over to the US, they were miserable at first. They were freezing cold. They couldn't communicate how they were feeling in English. We quickly learned that if your subject doesn't want to talk about something, there isn't a thing in the world you can do to get them to open up. And its crucial not to antagonize your subjects, or feel like your gain is at their expense. Not to mention that inevitably, you become close to your subjects. We made no pretense of journalistic distance on that front, but at the same time we never held anything back just because it wasn't pretty. In the scene where the players fight in the locker-room, the coach didn't want us to shoot. But we were clearly dealing with people going through a rough time, and wanted to show how they were handling it.

As a first time filmmaker I had to learn how to express what I wanted to see on film. I realized, for example, that movement was very important to us – movement and intimacy that reflect the dynamic nature of our subject. It also became clear to me that in documentaries you can't insist on perfection. When your subject is as complex as ours, anything too pristine is something to be suspicious of. We were blessed with beautiful light in Africa which makes everything glow. Ironically, that makes it almost hard to depict poverty, especially because the Senegalese are on the whole a very happy people. We were inspired stylistically by the rich colors and bustling urbanity of Dakar – a graffiti-covered port city.

In showing our film, we realized that it's hard to evade categorization. People wanted to brand us as a sports film, or a do-gooder film. Or, on the other hand, they wanted more edge from Africa – a confirmation of their expectations of war and poverty. But the narrative was never so simple. My intention from the start has been to tell the true story of these kids' lives and by doing so expose American audiences to something they would not otherwise have seen or known about. That story is a beautiful one – a story of these kids getting a one in a million chance, but it's also a story that realistically reflects the difficulty of that process. It's not for us as filmmakers to tell people what lesson to take away from viewing. You put something out there and it's up to the people in the audience to draw their own conclusions.