Winning isn’t everything! Giving it your all and basking in the sense of community is! That’s one of the lessons you may walk away with after watching a new documentary about four Irish rugby teams that defy stereotypes to tackle their way to the Mixed Ability Rugby World Cup. Step onto the pitch for Try!, a mix of full-contact action, joy and belonging.
The new doc from Irish director Oisín Mistéil about the sport, which is full-contact rugby played by people with and without physical and learning disabilities, world premieres in the People & Community strand of the Sheffield DocFest on Saturday, June 13.
Try! follows four Irish teams, from frozen winter training nights to the heat of World Cup competition in Spain, where 32 teams from 16 countries go head to head. “The competition is real, the tackles are hard and the celebrations are harder,” highlights a synopsis. “What emerges is a portrait of a world where inclusion isn’t an aspiration but the starting point, where belonging is built through shared mud, bruises and tries.”
In Try!, you can follow players finding community in a sport that refuses to leave anyone on the sidelines, changing what the sport looks like and who gets to be on the pitch.
Executive produced by David Collins and produced by Claire McCabe, the film features cinematography by Esme McNamee and editing by Keith Walsh. Pipedream Productions is handling sales.
Mistéil talked to THR about the journey behind Try!, the importance of authenticity and how the film strikes a note of human joy and togetherness.
The director never played rugby growing up, but he did play a lot of team sports. “Mixed Ability Rugby was a great reminder to me of what sport is actually about,” he tells THR. “I’m playing football [aka soccer] this year, and we’re trying to win division seven. But who actually cares?! When I’m 80 years old, I’m not going to remember if we won division seven, but I’m going to remember the moments, I’m going to remember the connections. And Mixed Ability Rugby forgets all the stuff that’s not important, because winning isn’t really important. We might tell ourselves that it is, but you know the old adage of it being about taking part. I always thought that was trite and cliché, but with Mixed Ability Rugby, it’s very much true.”
He first came across the sport in 2022 when the World Cup took place in Cork, Ireland. “There was only a little bit of coverage, and so, our producer Claire McCabe and I started to go down to training sessions and matches down in Cork, where two of the teams in our film are based, to see if there was something there,” Mistéil recalls. “Once we got down there and met some of the teams and players, it was like, ‘Oh my god, what an incredible community!’ We knew immediately that there was a documentary there, or maybe even a few documentaries.”
The trickiest part in the early stages of the doc was narrowing the scope, because “there are so many amazing characters and people,” explains the director. “Beyond the sporting underdog story and the on-pitch drama, even to get to the pitch, they’ve had to overcome so many challenges.”
Try! is full of atmosphere, and that was important to capture. “It’s a great way to deal with the subject of ability and different abilities, because it’s a really positive environment,” highlights Mistéil. “It’s a very fun and funny environment, and nobody takes themselves too seriously, which is really refreshing. And we’re hoping that that comes across in the film to reflect the ethos of the sport and how they view their own ability.”
To capture various scenes and material that may come into play during the World Cup, the team behind Try! had to shoot a lot of footage. “We needed to be there at all the important twists and turns,” emphasizes the filmmaker. “I think before the World Cup, we shot about 32 days. We wanted to spend a certain number of days with each team and character. And then we went to the World Cup, where we had three cameras running around, because there was so much going on, and you’ve got no idea who’s going to make the finals. You have no idea which game is going to be incredibly dramatic, so we felt we had to cover everything as best we could at the World Cup. So, that was just chaos – brilliant chaos.”
Safeguarding was key to the process behind the doc. “The longer we shot with our main characters, the stronger our relationships and friendships became, and there was a real sense of trust there,” shares the director. “But there was a huge duty of care. When you have people with mixed abilities on camera, there’s an extra layer of vulnerability that you have to be aware of and be responsible for. We talked a lot about how to go about making sure that the person on camera always understood our intention and always knew what the scene was about. And that person was always in control of what they were telling us.”
Even with release forms, “we made sure to have different versions of release forms with simpler information, or we would get a guardian, and we would talk both of them through it,” recalls the filmmaker. “So that was a challenge, but we were really pleased with how it went, and all of our characters were so, so giving.”
So, how did Mistéil and his team approach Try! and the genre of film they were working on? “It’s a sports documentary, but it’s also a Trojan horse for a film about people and their abilities and what they’ve overcome,” the director tells THR. “Getting that balance right, similar to the sport itself, getting the balance right between competitiveness and inclusion was actually a challenge, because you want both.”
In the editing process, Mistéil and editor Walsh experienced an evolution. “More and more, we felt that the matches became less important, and the stuff after the game became more important,” he explains. “Those are the speeches and the pep talks, and the arms around the shoulders. That’s where we got the real emotion.”
The creative team had the film title Try! in mind early on. “Actually, [producer] Claire’s husband, who’s a good friend of mine, will forever take credit for this,” Mistéil tells THR. “We wanted something snappy, but we had a debate about whether it should have an exclamation mark or not. I wanted it to have the exclamation mark. I feel that adds to the double meaning, and it’s nice to be part of the long line of exclamation mark films, such as Airplane! and Mamma Mia! That’s the tradition we want to carry on in film titles. I think it gives you the right sense of what’s coming.”
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