The Rebound is a documentary about a team of wheelchair-bound athletes on a quest to win a national championship.
Emerging from a successful two-year festival run comes the VOD release of this inspiring documentary, combining the incredible courage of a group of men society labels ‘handicapped’ and the drama of a sports team striving to be the best in the country. Naturally, it’s a genuinely moving experience filled with larger-than-life characters and a look behind the scenes of what it takes to live in their unique world, yet it’s also a terrifically entertaining movie with suspense and a ton of heart.
You probably know that sports for disabled people is a thing, often called ‘adaptive sports’ with nearly anything you can think of given its own competition for those with disabilities. From archery to water skiing and everything in-between is represented and thankfully, opportunities to play and compete on larger and larger stages is becoming the norm. For a group of disabled men in Miami, it’s basketball, and even as it offers them a chance to push themselves to limits they might not have once believed and is a source of great fun, they take it very seriously.
Their name is the Miami Heat Wheels and they are part of an organization called the NWBA (National Wheelchair Basketball Association) with divisions for Juniors, Adults, Women, and Intercollegiate who compete among teams from all across the United States. Looking to win the Division II Championship, we track their training and tournament play, meeting the team members and learning their often deeply emotional stories, many facing the camera and telling how they ended up in a chair. These are of course uncompromisingly personal.
That’s what’s balanced best in Shaina Koren Allen‘s 75-minute documentary, paralleling the drama of conquering life from a wheelchair to the authentic intrigue of a genuinely compelling sports thriller, one seemingly tailor-made for such. Here’s a team who is given barely enough money to buy tickets to travel to games, running car washes and asking for donations to join the competition, playing in chairs that they can hardly afford to keep maintained. That they do raise enough money and get to the Nationals is uplifting enough, getting to know these few men and what really drives them, the far greater reward. But yeah, the ending is a lump-in-your-throat nailbiter.
You quickly get the idea that Allen isn’t out to make a conventional documentary about those with certain physical challenges (let’s just ignore the fact these guys at one point play four full-length highly-competitive basketball games in one day). Sure, you’ll feel moved by what they have accomplished, but what’s remarkable about this is how wheelchairs gently fade into the background, allowing the players to shape the story, as they should … and deserve.
Allen is never on screen, the camera never intrusive. There are no question asked, no interviews, just a team working to overcome what they can to reach a common goal. It’s mesmerising. These are legit athletes doing some truly amazing things on and off the court. And they aren’t alone. We meet others, Allen taking a moment here and there to share some brief stories of women doing the same, teaching us that there really aren’t any boundaries even when it seems from our side that there are too many. The Rebound is one to catch. Highly recommended.