Prior to its Academy Award nomination, Murderball, a THINKFILM production co-distributed with MTV Films, has dominated the film festival circuit since its debut at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the Documentary Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Editing.
Combining literal sparks and the deepest poignancy, the 88-minute Murderball chronicles the lives of highly competitive, quadriplegic rugby players as they overcome extraordinary obstacles to become world-class athletes. Murderball, the sport’s evocative original name, combines the finesse of soccer with the bone-jarring collisions of a demolition derby, with the athletes using custom wheelchairs that look like something out of a Mad Max movie. Yet as gripping as the competitive interludes of the movie (including the 2004 Paralympics in Athens) are, it’s the off-court action of the players, lives played out with grit, heart and flawed humanity, that makes Murderball unforgettable.
For virtually the entirety of a 2 ½ year shoot, filmmakers Dana Adam Shapiro and Henry-Alex Rubin shot more than 200 hours of footage with Panasonic AG-DVX100A mini-DV 3-CCD 24p camcorders. Much of Murderball was a single-camera shoot, with Rubin himself shooting from a wheelchair in the camera’s advanced 24p mode, largely in available light. All of the games, however, involved two or three DVX100As, with Shapiro and David Rodriguez operating the additional units.
The inspiration for Murderball was a newspaper article about the sport read by Shapiro, then an editor at Spin magazine. He convinced his friend, filmmaker Rubin (Who Is Henry Jaglom, Freestyle), that Murderball was worth exploring as a movie subject. The longtime friends traveled to Sweden for the 2002 world championship to see what the game actually looked like. They found much more, including a potent narrative that pits former Team USA all-star Joe Soares, cut from the USA team and now coach of Team Canada, who seeks revenge against his former teammates, especially the equally volatile star USA player, Mark Zupan. Shapiro and Rubin realized that they’d gone abroad looking for a good sports story, and came home with a highly-cinematic drama.
For more about Murderball, visit www.murderballmovie.com.
For more on Panasonic visit www.panasonic.com/broadcast.
