USA,
2004, 86 min
Shown in 2005
CREDITS
- dir
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Dana Adam Shapiro, Henry Alex Rubin
- prod
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Jeffrey Mandel, Dana Adam Shapiro
- cam
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Henry Alex Rubin
- editor
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Geoffrey Richman, Conor O’Neill
- mus
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Jamie Saft
- source
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Thinkfilm, 155 Avenue of the Americas, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10013. FAX: 646-293-9407. EMAIL: dfenkel@thinkfilmcompany.com.
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COMMENTS
Henry Alex Rubin, Dana Adam Shapiro and film subjects Mark Zupan, Andy Cohn and Scott Hogsett in person.
OTHER
Rugby is a rough sport. When quadriplegics play it, it’s even rougher. Murderball is the combative, funny, educational and inspiring account of hypercompetitive, wheelchair-bound men who play “quad rugby” with a passion equaling that of any professional athlete. Joe Soares, once the star of the unrivaled Team USA, is inexplicably yanked from the squad, so he gleefully crosses the border to coach the former enemy, Team Canada—with the sole aim of beating Team USA at the 2004 Paralympics in Athens, Greece. Mark Zupan, a jock with some serious tattoos and an attitude to match, considers Soares worse than a traitor and spurs his teammates on to maintain their supremacy. Thanks to their unfettered access to the locker rooms, bedrooms, hospitals, and hotels where these men live and play, directors Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro convey the strong personalities, petty confrontations and genuine emotions that run high on and off the court. In addition to the manic intensity of the sport, this richly rewarding film also offers us the main players’ backstories—childhood polio, a rare blood disease, a motocross accident, a drunk driver —as well as their relationships with wives and girlfriends and, in one case, with the man who put one of them in his wheelchair.
—Stefan Gruenwedel
FACTOID #328
Saul Bass, the genius graphic designer behind the introductory sequences to Hitchcock’s Psycho, Vertigo and North by Northwest, designed the posters for the second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth installments of the San Francisco International Film Festival.
