“The universe will let you know when you need to change track.” Emily Petricola – Paralympian
ARA has produced their first film. Many people had the opportunity to watch the film in cinemas around Australia recently. Changing Track had a positive reception all round. ARA is proud to partner with AusCycling, in particualr our para-cyclists and partnering with them on this project was no different.
Changing Track
The new documentary, “Changing Track,” offers a raw and intimate look into the lives of three Australian para-cyclists, reve`1230-aling the immense personal challenges and triumphs on their road to the Paralympics. The film steps away from mere statistics and results to explore the deeply human stories of Emily Petricola, Korey Boddington, and Kane Perris, and their transformative journey through the world of competitive cycling. The documentary’s director and co-director, Tristan and Timothy Kenyon, was inspired by the athletes he witnessed at the Sydney 2000 Paralympics. He notes that for many of the Paris 2024 para-cycling team, the sport was lifesaving. “We never know what someone is going through, or where they’ve been”. It is this unseen journey, the story behind the athlete, that “Changing Track” aims to illuminate.
The Creative Team
Tristan Kenyon is a passionate storyteller who works as a director and producer across multiple disciplines, including writing and editing. Tristans 2025 feature directorial debut film, “Changing Track,” was his first movie co-produced with his brother Timothy under their new company, ARA Films.
Timothy Kenyon is an Australian film industry professional with over twenty years of experience in animation and visual effects, specialising in technical lighting and cinematography. His career highlights include Happy Feet 2, The Lego movie franchise and The Great Gatsby.
Romain Mongin is a highly experienced editor with 17 years in film, broadcast, and advertising, who now runs a video production company in the Blue Mountains.
Athony El-Ammar is a film and TV composer with over 20 years of experience, known for creating evocative soundtracks across various genres for international audiences. He is also the founder of Evolution Series, a leading Australian sample library company.
The film follows three athletes with unique and compelling backgrounds.
- Emily Petricola, diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at 27, battled depression as the disease progressed.
- Kane Perris, born with Albinism and legally blind, endured severe bullying in his childhood, leading to anxiety and OCD.
- Korey Boddington survived two major accidents, including a motocross crash that left him in a coma with a brain injury and lasting damage to the right side of his body.
For each, the discovery of cycling offered a new focus and a powerful sense of ability, shifting their perspective from what they couldn’t do to what they could.
“Changing Track” delves into the emotional and mental fortitude required to compete at an elite level. It captures Petricola’s battle with a relapsing MS, Perris’s confrontation with resurgent anxieties under the pressure of tandem cycling, and Boddington’s unwavering trust in his motto, “just get better, always be better”. Petricola shares, “my hope is that anyone else who faces a life changing challenge can realise that just because life is changing from what you know or expect, it does not have to be a negative thing”.
The film also highlights the crucial, yet often fraught, process of ‘Classification,’ which categorises athletes based on their impairment. For Petricola and Perris, this was a “triggering time” that forced them to focus on their limitations rather than their strengths. Perris expresses that the documentary “goes deeper than competition. It explores the human stories behind the athletes, who we were before sport, who we are now, and who we’re still becoming through para-cycling”.
ARA Films
ARA Films is a new Australian based production company that is the creative arm of the ARA Group. The ARA Group, primarily an industrial services business, is a significant supporter of the arts, literature, and sports in Australia, including being the naming rights sponsor of the Australian Cycling Team. ARA’s portfolio of support is extensive, with partnerships including the Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland Writers’ Festivals, the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), and the Story Factory.
Although principally an industrial services business, the ARA Group is a keen supporter of the arts and literature, employing a talented creative team to communicate our message to clients and the broader community. Combining this with our sponsorship of Australian cycling and focusing on courageous para cyclists, we are proud to have completed the ARA Films debut documentary feature, Changing Track.
Executive Producer and ARA Group CEO, Edward Federman, initiated the documentary project in April 2024, driven by a desire to tell the stories of these courageous athletes. It is our mission to invest in more projects that utilise the talent within our team to produce meaningful and unique fiction and non-fiction film and television productions.
FilmInk Review – 9.2/10
Visually arresting, fast-paced and deeply affecting…
One of the many (many, many) great things about the documentary form is its often-extraordinary ability to draw the audience into worlds and ideas that they may previously have been wholly unfamiliar with. Sure, fictional cinema can do this too, but the raw immediacy of documentary filmmaking – the sheer truth of it – makes it a much more powerful cinematic medium in this regard. There’s no better recent example of this than the potent, strikingly honest and poetically forged doco Changing Track, which hums with a sense of authenticity rarely achieved. The world of those living with disability is often discussed and depicted on screen in fleeting terms, but Changing Track digs in, and digs deep, providing a fascinating window into a difficult, often bruising world.
