“Rising Phoenix” Netflix Documentary Review by Brooke Daugherty : Pop Culture Leftovers

“Rising Phoenix” Netflix Documentary Review by Brooke Daugherty

September 13, 2020 8:45 am |

*The history and current standing of the Paralympic Games, which has grown to become the world’s third largest sporting event.*

Rising Phoenix is a documentary not just for fans of the Paralympics, but also sports buffs, documentary watchers, and people who love to hear others’ stories. Interviews with athletes and other persons of interest are informative and entertaining. We even get an interview with the Duke of Sussex, or as us Yanks know him, Prince Harry.

Bonhôte and Ettedgui took the time to shoot the athletes in their element; a swimmer underwater and a fencer practicing jabs. These vignettes are intertwined with interviews and footage of the athletes as they tell their stories. Throughout the film, the history of the Paralympics is told as well as its near demise in Rio 2016.

Bebe Vio is an Italian medal winning athlete in wheelchair fencing. She is also a quad amputee from childhood meningitis. Her story is compelling. Vio talks about what it was like for her as an athlete to have lost both arms and both legs by age 11. In an even more heart wrenching story, Jean-Baptiste Alaize lost his leg as a child during war in Burundi. He now competes in the para long jump for France.

Tatyana McFadden, a paralympian in both summer and winter games serves as one of the featured athletes and an executive producer. She competed in the Paralympics for the first time as a teen in 2004 in track and field. She decided to participate in the winter Paralympics also by competing in downhill skiing in 2014-ten years after her very first Paralympics.