Steven Soder­bergh takes on the NBA in High Fly­ing Bird trailer

Steven Soder­bergh likes to blaze his own path through the film indus­try, whether that means sin­gle­hand­ed­ly invent­ing new meth­ods of financ­ing a project or cut­ting costs by shoot­ing an entire fea­ture on an iPhone. Appro­pri­ate­ly, his next film will focus on a pair of self-pro­claimed ​‘dis­rup­tors’ who also set out to upend the sta­tus quo of a big, pow­er­ful business.

Net­flix has unveiled their first trail­er for High Fly­ing Bird, the first of two Soder­bergh fea­tures slat­ed for release this year, in addi­tion to his ges­tat­ing Pana­ma Papers pic­ture The Laundromat.

André Hol­land reunites with scribe Tarell Alvin McCraney – who wrote the play upon which Holland’s star-mak­ing Moon­light was based, as well as the script for this film – to por­tray ath­let­ic agent Ray Burke at a time of cri­sis. A full-blown lock­out has shak­en the NBA to its foun­da­tions, but while the mon­eyed own­ers try to get the play­ers back in line, Ray’s launch­ing a dar­ing gam­bit to shift the bal­ance of pow­er forever.

He’s joined in the cast by Zazie Beetz, Melvin Gregg, Son­ja Sohn, and Kyle MacLach­lan.

Sharp-eyed view­ers may also notice an odd pol­ish on the visu­als in the trail­er; Soder­bergh has once again used the iPhone 7, out­fit­ted with tele­scop­ic lens­es, to com­plete all cin­e­matog­ra­phy under budget.

The clip throws a lot at you and quick­ly, per­haps as a reflec­tion of an inside-bas­ket­ball film that spends more time in tense board­room meet­ings than the hard­wood court. Those expect­ing the sort of rous­ing, inspi­ra­tional sto­ry so com­mon to the sport­ing genre will be sur­prised to find a film pri­mar­i­ly con­cerned with the ten­sion between insti­tu­tions and individuals.

High Fly­ing Bird will pre­mière at the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val on 27 Jan­u­ary, before arriv­ing on Net­flix in the US on 8 February.