For most, the Summer Olympics run from late July to early August, although not many are aware that coming right behind are the Paralympics, which stands for ‘parallel to the Olympics,’ a movement promoting sport for athletes with impairments. 

A new Netflix film titled “Rising Phoenix” discusses just that how the Paralympic Games came to be, from their grassroots to Rio 2016 by way of sharing different athletes’ life experiences and disability origins. From escaping war to fighting against terminal diseases, every para-athlete’s story is different and, as the film suggests, ‘at the Olympics everybody looks the same, and at the Paralympics no single body looks the same…’

Among others, the documentary film features United States para-athlete Tatyana McFadden, Australian para-swimmer Ellie Cole, Italian Paralympic fencer Bebe Vio and French para-athlete Jean-Baptiste Alaize. 

The film documents how the Paralympics originated in the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the United Kingdom in 48, when Sir Ludwig Guttmann organized the first sports competition featuring World War II veterans who had suffered from spinal cord-related injuries as a result of the conflict. At first, the event would be known as the Stoke Mandeville Games, named after the hospital for injured service personnel.

Over the next few years, the movement grew, and in 1960 the first-ever Summer Paralympic Games took place in Rome, Italy. That event featured 209 competing athletes distributed across 57 medaling events in eight sports. The year’s edition would also mark the first time in history in which both the Olympics and what is today known as the Paralympics were hosted at the same venues.

Flash-forward to the Rio 2016 Games, when the Organizing Committee had spent most of its budget on the Olympics and had even fewer volunteers registered for the Paralympics than it did for the Olympics. At this point Paralympians and those involved in the games were concerned that the committee would end the event..

Aside from the general plot that this documentary brings forward and it may shed light on the Paralympics in a different and innovative way, it almost seems as if the overall theme is too focused on just a random group of athletes coming from different socioeconomic backgrounds and different medical experiences.

When looking at a film documentary as this is, viewers generally would look for a hook, something that keeps them engaged with the overall plot which the film lacks in the aforementioned way.

Focusing on the general layout of ideas, it seems as if the plot is constantly in spirals as personal stories and background information related to the Games themselves are lumped together without a clear focus or message.

In a sense, however, they do a good job when referring to the rhetoric of the film, as it tugs at the viewers emotions– shedding a tear with some of the personal stories, for instance.

With the postponed Games now around the corner again, should the health crisis permit, releasing the film has served the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) as a gateway to raise awareness on the Paralympic movement and continue the trend that gained the movement the world’s recognition during the London 2012 Paralympics.

Image from Netflix via YouTube