Endless Abilities

Zack Bastian stars in the documentary, Endless Abilities.

When Zack Bastian, twenty-eight, who grew up in South Kingstown, isn’t in his wheelchair — the result of a dirt bike accident in 2003 — he’s doing things you might not expect from a paraplegic, including surfing Rhode Island waters and skiing up north.

Add to that a focus of a documentary, Endless Abilities. In 2012, Bastian and three young filmmaking friends made a cross-country quest to document and showcase people with disabilities overcoming adversity through sport, including the newly injured and Paralympic athletes, ranging from a blind rock climber in Denver to a wheelchair motocross participant in Pittsburgh. Bastian is a narrative thread throughout the film, which took forty-five travel days, 7,000 miles and two years of production to complete.

The concept began when local documentary filmmakers Will Humphrey, Harvey Burrell and Tripp Clemens met Bastian one day in Newport, where he now lives, and wanted to tell his story. It was originally going to be a two-minute video following Bastian’s surfing but snowballed into a seventy-two-minute feature-length documentary telling the stories of many athletes.

“The summer of 2012 will forever be remembered as the best summer of our lives,” Bastian says in the film. endlessabilities.org