New doco shows the importance of representation in front of - and behind - the camera

Wheelchair rugby is often portrayed in the mainstream media as a sport for high-functioning, strong, male athletes with spinal cord injuries; they’re often positioned by others as ‘superhuman’ disabled people rolling across our screens during the Paralympic Games. 

But the new documentary Wheel Blacks: Bodies On The Line takes viewers behind the scenes of the national team as they try to qualify for the Paris Paralympics. The three-part documentary series explores how wheelchair rugby encourages a sense of pride where people are surrounded by peers who experience life the same way. 

It’s the first major production from Sweet Productions, which was formed with “the intention of creating an authentic disability-led screen production company”, says director and producer Robyn Paterson. Her business partner Jai Waite, a wheelchair-user, has 17 years of film experience as an editor and post-production producer; he says it’s rare for people with disabilities to have a production company because the industry can be “pretty ableist”, often reducing a disabled person’s involvement to token roles on a production team.

In contrast, Sweet Productions has been built with structures in place that cater to all their needs. Waite describes them as having a “New Zealand number 8 wire way of doing things”.

As a disabled duo, Waite says he and Paterson find unique ways of navigating barriers together. “In terms of pure production stuff... I might have to get someone to plug in some cables every now and then,” he says. “[But] I'm just very lucky to have Robyn as a business partner because she gets it, she understands.”

This way of working is appreciated by Paterson, too. While in the middle of filming at the Paralympic Qualification Tournament in Wellington, Paterson experienced a “full flare-up” with fibromyalgia, which resulted in her leaving the tournament in a “somewhat dramatic fashion”. She credits this freedom to be open about her accessibility needs as having a profound impact on her work. “It's only when you do have something that you realise what you didn’t have… that's been quite a revelation for us.” 

She says rather than being the diversity “tick box” on a project, disabled people are present right throughout the production process at Sweet Productions. She says while the industry has become a lot better at asking who's telling a story and why, that same scrutiny is not always applied in the same way to disabled content. “To be in the position where we are those people making those final decisions … and ultimately owning that content is huge for us.”

And this authenticity is felt across the screen too. As filmmakers they intentionally didn’t use disability as a narrative driver; they were not asking: how can we tell a disabled story? “We just wanted to make a great sports documentary,” says Paterson. “It's not a story about ‘inspirational disabled athletes’. It's absolutely acknowledging people's disability and it's acknowledging their personal journeys, but first and foremost, it's a story about athletes.” 

“Along the way the audience learns things just by watching,” says Waite. “They don’t need to be told, ‘this is how you transfer into a [wheel]chair’.”

The documentary also plays into some familiar disability humour too. At one point in the first episode, athletes with less hand function are jokingly referred to as ‘slugs’, and later in the episode, team manager Yann Roux sheepishly recounts the impact their team’s travel had on other passengers. “If you see a lot of people in wheelchairs in your plane, and your plane is delayed by an hour, it’s probably because of us,” he quips.

The impact of the sport’s severe lack of funding – it is mostly a voluntary activity for both the athletes and coaches – was also felt behind the scenes. While filming many training events and tournaments, Waite and Paterson also jumped into other roles. Waite played commentator at the last minute for some games, while Paterson would get stuck in playing ball catcher at the end of the court to feed the ball back to the team. “I definitely had to brush up my skills,” she laughs. 

Paterson ultimately comes back to authentic story-telling being the purpose of their work. “I really hope that the community are able to see themselves reflected on screen in a really empowering way.”

Wheel Blacks: Bodies On The Line premieres this Sunday 18 August at 8.30pm on Sky Open, and on Neon from 19 August 

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