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Disabled Film Director Niko von Glasow Discovers a World of Fierce Competition—And a Challenge to His Own Stereotypes
“By making himself part of the story, [Niko von Glasow] enriches the film with his own life experience, but also with deadpan charm and irreverent humor.” — Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter
Who better to cover the Paralympics, the international sporting event for athletes with physical and mental disabilities, than the world’s best-known disabled filmmaker? Born with severely shortened arms as a result of his mother taking the drug thalidomide in the late 1950s and early 1960s, German director Niko von Glasow has charted an enviable film career, transitioning from making coffee for famed director Rainer Werner Fassbinder to directing his own award-winning movies (NoBody’s Perfect, Wedding Guests). In My Way to Olympia, Niko is at his comic and heartfelt best.
In the opening shot, the filmmaker declares that “basically I think sports suck, and the Paralympics is a stupid idea.” Yet his rumpled sincerity and warm-hearted skepticism are irresistible. As the story unfolds, his own stereotypes about disability and sports get delightfully punctured.
Niko von Glasow’s My Way to Olympia, an Official Selection of the Berlin International Film Festival, has its national broadcast premiere on Monday, July 7, 2014 at 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings) as part of the 27th season of POV (Point of View), American television’s longest-running independent documentary series. POV is the recipient of a 2013 MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.
Niko’s distaste for athletics is rooted in his frustrations as a disabled child forced to play sports. Moreover, without having yet attended the Paralympics, he wonders if they are “a big show to disguise the big problem between society and disabled people.” So he sets off, sometimes accompanied by his 14-year-old non-disabled son, Mandel, to meet a few of the top Paralympic competitors and to follow their fortunes as they prepare for and compete in the 2012 games in London. He questions why those for whom daily life is such a struggle would put themselves through such ordeals. Is it all a feel-good exercise?
What Niko discovers is a group of incredibly adaptable, determined and optimistic people performing athletic feats sometimes more astounding than those of regular Olympic athletes.
The American armless archer Matt Stutzman was born with a defect similar Niko’s and competes with a specially adapted bow he operates with his feet and teeth. Matt lives in Fairfield, Iowa, with his wife and three young sons, and he fires his powerful arrows straight to the bullseye in some of the most amazing sports footage anyone will ever see. Niko and his able-bodied teenage son can barely lift the bow, yet Matt uses it to win enough competitions to provide for his family. A staunch supporter of American citizens’ right to bear arms, Matt shows off his rifle skills and counters Niko’s argument that in Europe, very few people die from gunshots, by pointing out that Europeans just stab each other with knives instead.
Niko begins to learn that Paralympic sports are less about disabilities than about being the best at something–the same reason every athlete in the world competes. He goes on to meet Norway’s one-armed table tennis player Aida Husic Dahlen, the entire Rwandan sitting volleyball team and Greek paraplegic boccia player Greg Polychronidis. Aida’s moves quickly make you forget she’s missing a limb. The Rwandans lost their feet (and in some cases their legs as well) to land mines and other weapons during their country’s civil war. Greg, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, competes entirely with his head while seated in a wheelchair.
Fascinated as he is by the athletes’ ingenious methods, Niko isn’t shy about questioning their motives–or bringing up more intimate subjects, such as sex, depression, fear and death. Far from being put off by the filmmaker’s candor, the athletes respond with enthusiastic explanations and demonstrations, and not a little candor of their own.
The director’s conversations with the Rwandans, who deal not only with missing limbs but also the traumas of brutal civil war, are touching, funny and instructive. Niko asks one of the players who on the team is Hutu and who is Tutsi. The man claims not to know, and insists he’s never been asked. Surprisingly, the young Rwandan refuses to talk about his country’s divided past, which Niko likens this to his own Jewish father’s refusal to talk about Nazism after World War II.
Similarly, when Niko learns that Aida from Norway was originally an orphan of the Bosnian War, he’s amazed to find she has never looked at images of that conflict or of her childhood before she was adopted. Matt the archer was adopted at birth, and even though he knows his biological parents, he has never asked them why they chose not to keep him. Niko begins to feel that perhaps it’s better to leave painful questions and memories unspoken.
Niko sees that his questions about early death can pause but not dim the love that surrounds boccia player Greg and allows the wheelchair-bound athlete to go for the gold. He has an extremely warm and welcoming family–his coach is his father–and they say that they are helped and enriched much more by having Greg in their lives than he is helped by them.
Niko’s skepticism softens as he increasingly identifies with the athletes and their struggles. And while no one expects him to sign up for a sport any time soon, he develops admiration for his subjects and a new, slightly-less-curmudgeonly respect for the world of Paralympic sports. By the time Niko and Greg travel together to the Greek city of Olympia, they are so close that Niko instinctively bends to put a hand on Greg’s shoulder as they proceed down a ramp into the world’s first Olympic arena. They begin to play boccia in the ancient Olympic dust–only to be told that sports are prohibited at the site.
My Way to Olympia is a fresh and fascinating take on the often-sobering subject of disability. It’s also a fresh and fascinating take on humanity’s common and persistent trait–the will to win. In fact, as the credits roll, Niko quips in his usual barbed way that his working title for the film was Triumph of the Will, Part 2.
“So many people, myself included, live in denial of their weaknesses,” says Niko. “These athletes are confronting their disabilities head-on, striving to conquer them. A man with no arms doesn’t have to take up archery, and his life would be much easier if he hadn’t. The more time I spent with these athletes, the more I understood that they aren’t just trying to be ‘as good as’ non-disabled athletes.
“I found the Paralympics altogether more interesting, fun, human and inclusive than the Olympic Games,” he continues. “As my relationships with my subjects became more intimate and, at times, more intrusive, I realized that Paralympians are much purer examples of the original Olympic spirit than many able-bodied Olympians. You can’t become a Paralympic athlete without totally embracing the ideals of togetherness and shared participation. Even I, who will certainly never win Paralympic gold, found myself caught up in that spirit, and unable to resist taking part.”
My Way to Olympia is an if… Productions film in co-production with Palladio Film GmbH, Senator Film Produktion GmbH, WDR, SWR and NDR.
About the Filmmaker:
Niko von Glasow, Director/Writer/Co-producer
Niko von Glasow started his filmmaking career by carrying beer crates and making coffee for Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He went on to study film at New York University and the Lodz Film School in Poland. His first feature film, Wedding Guests (1990), won the German Film Critics Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. Von Glasow followed up with Marie’s Song (1994), starring Sylvie Testud in her first film role, and The Edelweiss Pirates (2004), which starred Bela B. Felsenheimer, Jan Decleir and Anna Thalbach and was awarded the Grand Prix du Jury at Ciné-Jeune de l’Aisne.
My Way to Olympia completes Niko’s trilogy about the lives and feelings of people living with disabilities. For the darkly humorous, politically incorrect NoBody’s Perfect (2008), he convinced 11 other people born with disabilities from thalidomide to pose for a nude calendar. The film won the German Film Award for Best Documentary, brought him worldwide recognition and helped fuel a successful campaign to raise the compensation for the 2,700 surviving victims of thalidomide in Germany. In Everything Will Be Alright (2012), the filmmaker documents the making of a unique live theatrical production that he wrote and developed. The cast includes actors with physical and mental disabilities.
Niko founded the Tibetan Film School and holds talks and workshops on script writing and directing worldwide. He currently divides his time between London and Cologne. He is currently developing several projects, including Shoot Me. Kiss Me. Cut!, a film about 12 young filmmakers trying to achieve fame and fortune with their version of Romeo and Juliet, and Girl From Tibet, which tells the story of a young nomadic girl who is accidentally sent to live with a rich, neurotic Jewish family in New York.
Credits:
Director/writer: Niko von Glasow
Editors: Bernhard Reddig, Mechthild Barth
Director of Photography: Hajo Schomerus
Sound Recordist: Shinya Kitamura
Co-Producers: Niko von Glasow, Florian Caspar Seibel
Producer: Ingo Fliess
Running time: 56:46
POV Series Credits:
Executive Producer: Simon Kilmurry
Co-Executive Producer: Cynthia López
VP, Programming and Production: Chris White
Associate Producer: Nicole Tsien
Production Coordinator: Nikki Heyman
Produced by American Documentary, Inc. and now in its 27th season on PBS, the award-winning POV is the longest-running showcase on American television to feature the work of today’s best independent documentary filmmakers. POV has brought more than 365 acclaimed documentaries to millions nationwide. POV films have won every major film and broadcasting award, including 32 Emmys, 17 George Foster Peabody Awards, 10 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, three Academy Awards® and the Prix Italia. Since 1988, POV has pioneered the art of presentation and outreach using independent nonfiction media to build new communities in conversation about today’s most pressing social issues. Visit www.pbs.org/pov.
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POV’s Community Engagement and Education team works with educators, community organizations and PBS stations to present more than 650 free screenings every year. In addition, we distribute free discussion guides and standards-aligned lesson plans for each of our films. With our community partners, we inspire dialogue around the most important social issues of our time.
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Since 1994, POV Digital has driven new storytelling initiatives and interactive production for POV. The department created PBS’s first program website and its first web-based documentary (POV’s Borders) and has won major awards, including a Webby Award (and six nominations) and an Online News Association Award. POV Digital continues to explore the future of independent nonfiction media through its digital productions and the POV Hackathon lab, where media makers and technologists collaborate to reinvent storytelling forms. @povdocs on Twitter.
American Documentary, Inc. (www.amdoc.org/)
American Documentary, Inc. (AmDoc) is a multimedia company dedicated to creating, identifying and presenting contemporary stories that express opinions and perspectives rarely featured in mainstream media outlets. AmDoc is a catalyst for public culture, developing collaborative strategic engagement activities around socially relevant content on television, online and in community settings. These activities are designed to trigger action, from dialogue and feedback to educational opportunities and community participation.
Major funding for POV is provided by PBS, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Bertha Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, The Educational Foundation of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee, and public television viewers. POV is presented by a consortium of public television stations, including KQED San Francisco, WGBH Boston and THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG.
Contacts:
POV Communications: 212-989-7425. Alternate contact: 206-790-8697.
Cathy Fisher, cfisher@pov.org; Amanda Nguyen, anguyen@pov.org
POV online pressroom: www.pbs.org/pov/pressroom
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