Murderball

Rugby is played in wheelchairs and the rules are hard. The chairs are armoured; the collisions are real and they go over. All the players are paralysed below the neck but all have some movement in their hands. The documentary follows the American national team. The team has been winning for years. Then one player takes over as coach of the Canadian side and a personal reckoning opens between them. They go to the Paralympic Games. There is another story running: a young man who has had a motorcycle accident is in a rehabilitation centre and is learning the sport. Dana Adam Shapiro directs with Henry Alex Rubin. Joe Soares, Mark Zupan and other players are in it. It is an American production. The documentary won the audience award at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for the Oscar for best documentary. The narrative does not use the athletes as objects of inspiration; they talk coarsely, they are competitive, and they are not polite. The documentary also takes on sex, independent living and everyday difficulty directly. The coach Joe Soares is its most contested figure; he is hard on his team and on his son, and the film does not tidy him up. The camera goes inside the game and the collisions are given in close shots. The narrative joins the young man's line to the main story towards the end. Its limit is structure; the two lines are not equally strong and the tournament section settles into the classic sports film shape. Who it is for: viewers who like sports documentary and character driven work. Who it is not for: it is coarse, competition comes forward, and the ending is conventional.