In Move Me, Minnesotan Kelsey Peterson speaks with unflinching honesty, humor, and hope about her life in a wheelchair after a spinal cord injury. Co-directed by Peterson and Daniel Klein (The Perennial Plate), this documentary is “Part memoir, part cultural artifact, part awareness-raising, and all riveting” (Documentary.com). Move Me asks, “How do you find yourself when your body, your identity, has been taken from you?”
In 2012, at the age of 27, Peterson dove into Lake Superior and hit her head on the shallow bottom, ending up a quadriplegic paralyzed from the chest down. “I spend a lot of time imagining moving and remembering that feeling,” Peterson says while we see home videos of her as a giddy teen. “I wonder if it would just be easier to not have a memory of a life that I miss and a life that I want.” From the very beginning of Move Me, Peterson doesn’t shy away from explaining exactly how she feels and what her disability really means.
“I used to be Kelsey, the dancer, and now I’m Kelsey, the girl in a wheelchair,” she explains, noting how people underestimate her just because she shows up in a wheelchair. “People out of their periphery see a chair, and so they don’t even bother to look at the person.” It’s strained her relationship with her parents, especially her dad – her hero growing up. When she asks him over Facetime if he is mad at her after a conversation, he honestly tells her, “It’s a constant challenge to try to not be hurt and angry at this point,” which causes Peterson to hide her face in her hands. Peterson had been drinking the night of her accident, something her dad has been unable to get past. “Dad, you have to forgive me,” Peterson says through tears and he’s quick to respond that he forgave her. “You can still be angry about something and forgive someone for something that happened,” he says, explaining you’re only as happy as your least happy child. “I should have, and I could have done better,” Peterson acknowledges about that night over ten years ago. “But I didn’t. This chair puts up a wall between me and people that I love sometimes.”
But it’s not just the people she loves who bring her challenges, as she’s discovered how the world really isn’t made for people like her. We see shots of a determined Peterson trying to spray dry shampoo in her hair and struggling to pull out a ticket at a service counter. “You have to constantly be thinking ahead and creating this new dynamic between you and this thing that you’re still attached to,” Peterson narrates over visuals of her stretching in bed. “You still have to love [your body] though you feel removed from it a lot of the time.”
Despite the hurdles she faces, she slowly made a way of life for herself, living independently with rotating personal care attendants, re-learning how to drive without her feet, and dancing. A large amount of the film shows the lead up to Peterson helping choreograph (and ultimately perform in) “A Cripple’s Dance,” a dance production with live music. Peterson has her BFA in dance and is also a certified yoga teacher, both put on hold after her accident. You can see how Peterson longs to create, to tap into that part of her that used to leap across the stage, working out her frustrations with movement. A whole new world for her, choreographing in a wheelchair constantly reminds her of what she’s lost. “With dancing again… I’m excited for the possibilities,” she explains to a friend. “But these first few rehearsals are like a punch in the gut or a slap in the face.”
One of her good friends in a wheelchair as well, Gabriel Rodreick, provides the live music for the show (as well as the soundtrack for the documentary). Their beautifully raw friendship easily slips in and out of laughter and serious conversation. “I was just thinking about grieving my body,” Rodreick says to her at one point. “The loss of my body feels like grieving a death.” Peterson agrees, adding, “I don’t feel like I can be the person I used to be in many ways.” Perhaps, Rodreick wonders, they can still search for the feelings they experienced before their injuries, just through different avenues. “I’m not chasing what I used to have,” he explains. “I’m chasing those feelings that I got from dancing and singing and playing piano, because they can be found in so many different ways.”
With the use of old family videos, personal interviews, and beautiful cinematography, Move Me follows Peterson as she faces the unknown with courage, determination, and a few coarse words. We witness Peterson charting a new path as a woman and an artist, desperate to find herself in a differently abled body, but one that is still hers.
