In the festival that opens Wednesday, Alejandro de los Rios’ short is just one of the NOVAC entries screening and streaming.

It’s tempting to think of Game Day Ritual as a film that could only come from New Orleans. The combination of a team with as dubious a history as the Saints and fans with a legendary sense of play and participation would seem like the natural raw material for Alejandro de los Rios’ short, but not exactly. Fans of all teams use routines—what they wear, what they eat, where they sit—to find magic explanations for on the field losses.

“You think you’re uniquely cursed, but it’s all but one team every year,” de los Rios says. He bought into the magical thinking for a long time, but he eventually wondered if the Chicago Cubs’ decades without a championship were the result of incompetent ownership and not because a bar owner wasn’t allowed to enter Wrigley Field with his goat in 1945. Similarly, he came to question the belief that the Boston Red Sox’s years of frustration were the result of the curse that came with trading a young Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920.

“Was it the curse, or what it incompetence?” de los Rios wondered.

Game Day Ritual literalizes that connection between fan behavior and game results, and it will show during the New Orleans Film Festival, which opens Wednesday. De los Rios’ film will stream start Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. and run until midnight on October 28 at the film festival website. It will also show Sunday at 1:30 p.m. and Monday at 3:15 in the CAC Warehouse Theater.

The film’s world is one de los Rios knows well. He covered sports as a freelance writer for Gambit, and he works does video production for the Saints and the Pelicans. As a young sports fan, he went through all phases of the film’s concept. As a young fan in Washington, DC, he was the kind of kid who couldn’t change where he sat in a room after the Redskins scored. Still, he washed his hands of the team when the combination of toxic owner Dan Synder and journeyman quarterback Rex Grossman took all the fun out of games in the early 2010s. No amount of magical thinking could help him find fun in those years.

He describes Game Day Ritual as “The Fan meets The Goonies” with a little Groundhog Day thrown in for good measure. He thinks of the short as proof of concept. He and co-writer Jason Foster have imagined the film as a feature, and the short they made definitely implies a bigger world and story. On a technical level, it showcases de los Rios’ inventiveness. He employed some money-saving tricks to tell a story that involves the NBA Championship in one room. “It’s a fun showcase of local talent and ability, and hopefully my vision comes through as well, which is a bit absurdist,” he says.

Game Day Ritual is in large part the product of a network that de los Rios built by going through the Emerging Voices cohort at NOVAC, the non-profit video access organization in New Orleans. It’s a launch pad for young filmmakers as they learn the skills to help them find their voices, and it prepares students to work in New Orleans’ burgeoning film industry with production assistant training, camera workshops, and makeup workshops. The staff is as big as it has ever been for as long as he has been around, and he met many of the people who worked on his short at NOVAC.

Two new NOVAC-generated documentary shorts will also screen at “Louisiana Shorts: Empowering Community Storytellers,” a NOVAC showcase on Tuesday, October 22 at 6 p.m. at the CAC Black Box. De los Rios is the Virtuous Video Producer for NOVAC, and that program is responsible for two shorts in that showcase. The Buzz of St. Rock by Patrice Jones and Carl Harrison Jr. focuses on Harrison’s efforts to build a bee sanctuary in the St. Roch neighborhood and preserve the legacy of Black beekeepers in Louisiana; and Ishak, a short by Maaliyah Papillion and Mo Grizzly focuses on Papillion learning to carry the traditions of the Atakapa-Išhak Nation as the second woman to do so in 1771.

Game Day Ritual will be shown at the New Orleans Film Festival, but it is also in competition at the Louisiana Film Prize festival in Shreveport and in November it will show in Lafayette’s Southern Screen Film Festival. “It’s the Louisiana trifecta,” de los Rios says of the three biggest film festivals in Louisiana.

He had moved to New Orleans before the Saints’ 2009 season and started rooting for them six games in. Diehard fans sneer with condescension at those who jump on the bandwagon like that because they haven’t suffered enough through the bad years to somehow deserve the good ones. There was a time when de los Rios would have shared that attitude, but years of fandom helped him interrogate that attitude. He wondered if the only way to be a fan was go through years of hard times and disappointment. When he cheered for the Saints and nothing when wrong, it occurred to him, “Oh, I can choose to be happy?”

His experiences as a fan helped him realize that the through line in fandom was friendship, and as the movie shows, the people you share the rituals with are more important than the rituals themselves.

“Don’t let your passion for the team ruin what is the only thing you can control,” he says.