Ice hockey documentary based on Western Australian team wins major award

Meet the Garden Island Ice Pirates.

They have no sponsors. And barely enough players. But a whole lot of heart.

So begins an award-winning documentary Hard As Puck, based on Perth’s only para ice hockey club at Cockburn Ice Arena in Bibra Lake.

The Pirates shouldn’t exist, the doco tells viewers. “The summers are scorching,the ice rinks are few, and a severe lack of grants and sponsorships threatens to end the club for good,” it reveals.

“When the enigmatic founder, Dan, prepares to step away, a handful of stubborn, funny, passionate players must come together to keep the club alive.”

Hard as Puck’s premiere WA screened on Wednesday at Luna Palace Cinemas In Leederville and featured a Q&A session with Garden Island Pirates players and figureheads Rosa-Lee Principe, Mike Francis, Cliff Nutt, Belinda Green and Daniel Perrett.

The story takes a punch turn, to use ice hockey vernacular, when an unexpected opportunity emerges - the first-ever women’s world para championships that were held in Slovakia last year.

Australia signed up a team, it just had to find the players.

“It’s no longer just Pirates versus Pirates, it’s Pirates versus the world and a genuine chance for the sport, and our trusty Pirates, to be part of history,” the documentary reveals.

The documentary followed the Pirates’ players, which include celebrated para swimmer turned ice hockey defener Priya Cooper, to Slovakia.

Hard As Puck’s Melbourne-based director Isaac Elliott told Quarter by Quarter the documentary was quintessentiallly West Australian.

“This film really could have only taken place in Western Australia,” he said.

“The juxtaposition between an ice sport and the landscape really brings it. We always thought the whole time we were filming it, that we were making Cool Runnings in the West Australian landscape.

“The fact we would go from 40 degree heat and we were all putting jumpers on to go into an ice rink was just such an amazing, odd experience that’s only possible in WA.”

Hard As Puck has already picked up an audience award at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Elliott knows the subject matter well. He has been in a wheelchair since 2007, the result of a motorcycle accident.

But he wanted to avoid a stereotypical documentary on para athletes and instead focus of personanilities, politics and the day-to-day dramas of running a sporting club.

“I’ve watched just about every disability sport or disability recreation documentary and they all into the same trap where the second act becomes a story about how hard it is to live with a disability and I didn’t want to do that,” he said.

“It’s an easy empathy trap. I wanted to a sports film about people. And there are disabilities, but in most cases, we don’t ever find out what the disabilities are or how they became disabled or what life was like before their disability or how hard it is to live as a disabled person.

“I wanted to focus on who are they as people? And what does this sport mean to them and what does it take to play the sport? What does it take for a club to exist to play the sport? And what does it take to do the best you can do in such a niche sport?”

Elliott was approached by Perth-based producer Chanel Bowen in 2022.

“I didn’t know anything about the sport and I ran into Chanel at a documentary conference and she showed me some of the material and I thought,’This sport looks cool’. But I needed to meet the people because if we don’t have good subjects, we don’t have a film,” he said.

“So the first thing I did was fly over there and spent four days with the potential cast, just in a room, almost like a writer’s room, hearing their stories and seeing how they relate to each other and kind of using that to create the beginnings of a spine for a movie.

“And at that point, once we knew we had the characters, I knew that we would have a film.

“Characters make a film and characters make a documentary and you know, you can watch two interesting people rolling dice and it’ll be an amazing experience.

“I think we’ve lucked out in that we’ve got an incredible sport and some incredible talent who were just so open and honest and trusting of us to tell their story in the story of their club.

“A lot of Hard As Puck is about the fact that the Garden Island Pirates are the only team in Western Australia and they don’t have anyone to play against.

“And so much of it is about the fact that they not only have to battle against each other off the ice in terms of getting to the ice and fundraising and the interpersonal dramas that it takes, but also once they get on the ice, the team gets split down the middle to play against each other anyway.

“There’s no reprieve from this battle.”

This is Elliott’s first feature documentary.

His past credits include a documentary on male strippers and another on dating with a disability, both for SBS.

He was the main character in Finke: There and Back, a 2019 sports documentary diredted by Dylan River and narrated by Eric Bana.

“The sports nature of Finke: There and Back, the intersection of character and sport, was quite influential to Hard As Puck,” he said.