How Netflix’s Rez Ball Spotlights Indigenous Sports — and Introduces Benjamin Bratt's Nephew, Kauchani (Exclusive)

Kauchani Bratt was a sophomore in college when a casting call caught his eye.

“I was at University of California Santa Cruz studying philosophy, just going about my life and I had no idea what I wanted to be,” says the 23-year-old nephew of actor Benjamin Bratt. Despite the Hollywood connection, acting was not on his radar at the time.

“I was still in that process of figuring everything out," he says. "And one day I'm scrolling on Instagram and I see an open casting call for this Netflix movie produced by LeBron James.”

The ad was for a movie called Rez Ball, and the former high school varsity basketball player and San Francisco native, who grew up playing in tournaments across reservations, decided to put himself on tape and audition. “Even in my mind, the best possible outcome would've been if I could just be a background man, just so I could see the whole process of everything going through it,” he tells PEOPLE.

Then he scored the lead role in the emotional sports drama, which follows the Chuska Warriors, a Native American high school basketball team reckoning with the death of their star player as they quest to win the state championship in his memory.

Kauchani, whose mom’s side is Quechua and dad’s is Coahuiltecan Nation, says his famous uncle “was over the moon" at the news, and kept his acting advice simple: “Be respectful to people's time, be professional and show up on time and know your lines.” 

The story of Rez Ball, inspired by Michael Powell’s book Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation,  is a fictionalized account of a world writer/director Sydney Freeland knows well. 

“I played rez ball in high school,” Freeland says, as did co-writer Sterlin Harjo. “And so we just sort of drew from our own personal experiences and created this script from the ground up with the intent to try to tell a story from the inside out and introduce audiences to something they might not be familiar with.”

For actress Jessica Matten, playing Rez Ball’s tough-love high school basketball coach marks a “full circle” moment. Just over a decade ago, she was googling how to become an actor while working with teenagers across multiple reservations.

“I've been working around some of the most isolated Native reserves for the last 20 years, so it's pretty much all I know. And my main emphasis has been working with Indigenous youth,” she says, often focusing on suicide prevention, addiction and counseling. “I really wanted to understand and get to the root of what was happening with our people, what was happening with their younger generations, and how they were trying to heal from the intergenerational trauma that our communities at large are still trying to overcome.”

The opportunity presented in Rez Ball, she adds, was “a beautiful gift.”

All of the lead actors depicted on the Rez Ball basketball team are from various Indigenous groups around North America. For actor Devin Sampson-Craig, college was also his main focus when he heard about the casting opportunity.

“I was sitting down studying for a final” at the University of Washington in Seattle, says Sampson-Craig, who grew up on a reservation playing basketball as the son of an independent filmmaker dad. Nabbing a lead role in a movie destined for Netflix was “not supposed to happen to someone like me, at least I thought.”

After a September launch at the Toronto International Film Festival and the film’s recent streaming debut, the cast hopes audiences see “a reflection of themselves and what all of our communities go through,” says actress Julia Jones, who plays Kauchani Bratt's character's mother struggling with addiction. 

“It's such a national thing and we come from all these different tribes, but the one thing we do have in common is this issue with suicide — and also the coming together of what a game like Rez Ball can do for a community," she says. "It's that sense of belonging, of empowerment and healing through good and bad times.”

Rez Ball is now streaming on Netflix.