On awards night at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, Geoffrey Richman was camped in the overflow room. Tickets to the event were tight, so he watched the ceremony on a projection screen, shooting key bits with his handheld videocam. As a first-timer at Sundance and editor of one of the festival favorites, “Murderball,” Richman wasn’t insulted to be seated apart from the main action. He was pumped just to be there.

“The presenter started talking about the importance of editing in documentaries,” Richman relates. “I didn’t know if it was just a general comment or if he was introducing an actual award. Then he announced that they were giving the first-ever Special Jury Prize in Editing — and that he was pleased to present it to…me and [co-editor] Conor [O’Neill]!

“We had scenes of the players helping other young quadriplegics who were just starting their rehabilitation process. And so we were able to keep the idea of victory in there — we just didn’t show it the way we thought we would.”

“It was a surreal moment,” continues Richman. “I was still in the next room filming the projection screen, and I didn’t know they were waiting for me to come up on stage. Then one of our people yelled out, ‘He’s in the overflow room!’ So that was my cue to get up. [Co-director] Henry [Rubin] dragged me down the aisle, and I had, like, ten seconds to come up with some thank yous. And when I left the stage I forgot the award, so the guy had to call me back to get it.”

Kinetic Cuts

Jitters and modesty notwithstanding, Richman is justly proud of earning the first editing award in the history of the Sundance festival. Documentary may be a form better known for sedentary styling, but his cuts and pacing in “Murderball” recall the kinetic dynamism of a thriller.

The filmmaking team was inspired by the passionate energy of their subjects, young men who won’t allow paralysis to keep them off the playing field. Their sport, quad rugby, is one of the roughest and toughest sports around. Fiercely competitive and no-holds-barred violent, it’s played in armored wheelchairs that recall the gladiatorial frenzies of “Ben Hur.”

“Murderball” shatters every stereotype about being handicapped, showcasing the rock-hard willpower of men who refuse to be pitied. The 86-minute movie centers on the rivalry between the U.S. and Canadian quad rugby teams as they progress through several levels of worldwide competition to earn berths in the 2004 Paralympics Games in Athens, Greece. It focuses on three players, interweaving their personal stories of injury and healing as they train, travel, work, play and compete over a period of two and a half years.

Plot Holes

As lead editor Richman faced a number of challenges — chiefly, like any editor of a documentary about a contest, he couldn’t know in advance which team would win. “When we started discussing the structure of the film, many pieces of the story hadn’t been shot,” he relates. “Plus, we didn’t know until very late whether we would even get the rights to film at the Paralympics. So for a long time we were cutting under the assumption that we’d have to use another match for the climax. But because there were so many scenes building up to a summit between the U.S. and Canada, the film would have been nothing without Athens.”

Although they finally secured the rights to shoot at Athens, the surprises and uncertainties continued. “The best case scenario was a finals match between the U.S. and Canada, but we were concerned they might not even play each other,” Richman says. “And we didn’t know who would win and whether it would be a good, tight game. If one team got an early lead and smashed the other, it wouldn’t be very dramatic.”

The perfect ending called for a U.S. win, says Richman, because Canada had beaten the U.S. at the world championships in Sweden, and “that was the natural arc of the main character’s storyline.”

So when the U.S. team lost, “we said, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do,’” he remembers. But after he looked at some of the footage from after the match, another fruitful and compelling theme spontaneously revealed itself.

”This whole life-is-bigger-than-the-game theme came out,” he says. “We had scenes of the players helping other young quadriplegics who were just starting their rehabilitation process. And so we were able to keep the idea of victory in there — we just didn’t show it the way we thought we would.”

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