Kavery Kaul (2011, 40 min.)
BACK WALKING FORWARD is streaming on a sliding scale for $2–12
March 22nd through April 5th
A car accident left Eric with traumatic brain injury at the age of nineteen. On the long and uncertain road to recovery, an active young man suddenly bound to a wheelchair and unable to start college, Eric struggles to relearn life skills, as he searches for a place in a once-familiar world. His family must redefine happiness, as they too search for a “new normal”. They wander the borderland between hope and despair. Will Eric walk again?
According to the International Brain Injury Association, traumatic brain injury is the prime cause of disability worldwide. Roadside bomb explosions leave young men and women with the “signature wound” of today’s wars. In conflict zones, military and civilians both share the risk. At home, a car accident, a sudden fall, a sports injury, leaves so many lives forever altered—without warning.
Eric’s parents and neurosurgeon give us the caregiver's perspective and the medical context. At the same time, filmmaker Kavery Kaul focuses on Eric, a lively, capricious, defiant character who engages and surprises us. When the film was first released ten years ago, The Villager called it “fiercely unsentimental... universally applicable and deeply poignant.” Television executive and disability rights activist Loreen Arbussaid, “In this documentary, the essence of the human spirit is revealed. And we discover more of our own.” ABC-TV journalist, himself a survivor of brain injury, found it “an amazing and absorbing documentary.”
Join us Friday, March 26th at 7pm EDT for a live Zoom conversation between BACK WALKING FORWARD filmmaker, Kavery Kaul, and CRIP CAMP filmmakers, Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham.
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