Disabled Kiwis chase dreams

April 28-May 5, 2020 Your 7-Day Listings Guide The new series Unbreakable features people with disabilities who are determined to do the things most people take for granted

Sports and horse-racing mad Matthew suffers from what his dad calls a ‘‘double whammy’’. He has CMT, a hereditary disease that causes his nerves and muscles to waste away and is also recovering from a brain injury, after a car crash in 2016.

‘‘Even if you’ve got something wrong with you, in the end you’re still a person and I just think it shouldn’t matter. People should be treated the same,’’ says Matthew, a 35-year-old Aucklander, one of the stars of Unbreakable ,a seven-part documentary series following a group of New Zealanders with physical or intellectual disabilities as they set out to achieve their dreams.

It’s somewhat ironic that those ‘‘dreams’’ – looking for love, finding a job, playing sport, going flatting or to university – are things most of us take for granted.

Matthew’s dad – who also has CMT and is a wheelchair-user – wants him to find a girlfriend and Unbreakable follows Matthew’s search for romance. ‘‘I just thought it would be good to tell my story and show people that we can do anything, even though we’ve got some challenges,’’ he says.

The first episode also introduces viewers to

Analise, a 15-year-old with Tourette’s syndrome who wants to perform and record with her band, and rugby league fanatic Daley, who has cerebral palsy but hopes a league competition for the disabled will give him a chance to get into the action.

Producer Rachel Currie (How Not To Get Cancer,

The Big Ward) has a long track record in making documentaries about people with disabilities and has won three English Royal Television Awards for her work.

Her interest in how people live with mental and physical challenges was sparked by a very personal experience.

‘‘When I was much younger my father had a stroke.

He was a real go-getter – right into sport and had a very active job – and it completely decimated him,’’ she says.

‘‘He went from being really fit to not being able to walk, talk, feed himself or even move.’’

But what struck her even more was the lack of empathy from her local community. ‘‘It was awful. This was in the 1980s, I was a teenager and he was ostracised

– people stopped visiting. It was a really slow rehab but when he started being able to move around, people would cross the street to avoid him,’’ she says

‘‘He did make a remarkable recovery but he only did so because he didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He would show up at rehab every day even though he didn’t have an appointment.’’

That experience sowed the seeds for Unbreakable.

‘‘It’s about resilience and losing everything and being able to build something on that. The disability, it’s the mountain, but it’s not necessarily the journey.

‘‘I wanted to get to the point where it was all about the dream.

What they are going after rather than what was holding them back,’’ Currie says.

‘‘There are amazing people out there but we were trying to find people who not only have some form of disability but were on a journey or had a dream. However, we didn’t want this to be a reality TV series where we dreamt something up for them. The researchers did a terrific job and in the end we had more people than we could film.’’

Currie has nothing but admiration for the courage of the people who allowed the cameras into their lives. ‘‘This shows them at their most vulnerable as well as their most victorious and they were willing to share that with us.,’’ she says, adding there are downs as well as ups for all.

‘‘It would be amazing if viewers could look at this and think these people are different and then get to the end of it and think ‘actually they’re not different. They are like us’.’’

– Kerry Harvey, TV Guide

Unbreakable, TVNZ 1, Tuesdays