A legacy is restored in director Tucker Gragg's 21-minute short film Not Pictured, a possibly unknown and certainly seldom referenced story related to the 1940 Indiana University Basketball team that captured the school's first ever men's basketball national championship. While it seems almost inconceivable that there's anything about our basketball heritage that remains unknown in Indiana, the story of those team members who weren't allowed to play in the championship game due to a long vanquished rule that limited the number of those who could travel to twelve, meant that those who'd played during the regular season were lost to history.

Not Pictured focuses on one of those players and his family's perseverance in getting him reinstated to that historic 1940 roster.

Largely utilizing archival footage and modern day interviews, Gragg tells the story of William Torphy, a young man from Bedford, Indiana whose brother also played for the Hoosiers. The story is an interesting piece of IU Men's Basketball history that should interest fans of Hoosier Hysteria and certainly IU graduates and fans.  Not surprisingly, the film has an emotional resonance courtesy of Torphy's story and how it all played out, facts that I will leave for you to discover. However, this is one short film that is deservedly placed alongside some other fine films in this year's Indy Film Fest Hoosier Lens collection.

The film has already screened once at Indy Film Fest, but will also screen on July 20th at 7pm in the Toby and on July 21st at 3pm in DeBoest Lecture Hall. For more information, visit the Indy Film Fest website.

Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic