About this Short Film
No description available for this film.
Film Details
Country:
Australia
Category:
Open Entrant Documentaries
Festival Year:
2017
Filmmaker:
Billy Ptolemy
Film Transcript
By accident it happened when I was just a little boy. It happened at the school, one of the first types. I was playing with a friend back in those days with a little old cane hoop, rolling it along, just like he does fast asleep today, and I slipped on the wet grass while they were mowing the lawn and I ended up underneath the mower. The right one — so one leg went to the safe outside and one leg went to the inside — and everything changed.
I've always competed and participated in Taekwondo from an able-bodied perspective. I've never met another leg amputee doing Taekwondo, certainly not from my sort of small country town — there has never been anybody to connect with in that sense. For me I just thought it was the same as everybody else. As time went on I discovered that it was a little bit more unique and there were other parts of the Taekwondo community to be shared with the carer or disabled community that didn't exist before.
These days I've actually taken that opportunity and dedicated classes to teaching those with — rather than say 'disabilities', people with varying abilities. These include things like cerebral palsy and spina bifida, and people with autism, bound physical disabilities as well as intellectual. I managed to fire the work up here and stray a little bit and I've started Australia's first para‑Taekwondo Development Committee on a national level. I'm communicating with the world governing bodies, the World Taekwondo Federation, to create opportunities for greater inclusion of disabilities such as mine in elite athletic levels, such as the Olympics or Paralympics.
Welcome AM Beauty X is a social program I created just last year. It's a mechanism that we've created to allow for other amputees and those with limb difference to inspire and propagate the concept, to make it more important and more mobile.
I think at some point you get to that edge of life and go, "Where is it going? What's the legacy I can make?" I can make money, I can be successful, I can do all these things, but you really want some sort of lasting value out of being involved in community. That's our place. If you're a member of a community you want to contribute, and I think for me I found — maybe I'm a little selfish in that — I get a great deal out of getting involved in and helping other people. Using the fact that I've got 40 years of disability experience — I've been a child, I've been a teenager, I've been an adult amputee — I've been alone, I've been in groups, and I've discovered that while I'm not alone in it, I'm able to inject much more information in than I thought I possibly could and contribute to the progression of other people in the life and the community that's around them. I think I can do a lot more with that experience.
Filmmaker
Billy Ptolemy is the filmmaker behind this entry. See every Focus on Ability entry from Billy Ptolemy.
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