American snowboarder Kevin Pearce was a favourite to compete in the 2010 Winter Olympics. That is, until December 31, 2009, when a failed attempt at a cab double cork left Pearce with a critical brain injury.
Now the athlete appears in The Crash Reel, a documentary feature about his hopes, the accident and how the support of family and friends has helped him to recover.
Premiering as the Opening Night Gala film on 19 January 2013 at the Sundance Film Festival, The Crash Reel enjoyed its Australian premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival last month.
It isn’t Pearce’s first time Down Under, with the 25-year-old recalling he has visited before for a snowboarding event. Perisher Blue, he notes, was “awesome” even though “it didn’t really have much snow.”
That Pearce is back in Oz now is reflective of how much his life has changed from a few years ago. Ever-optimistic Pearce, however, maintains it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
“My life now is pretty cool, it’s so different. Like right now all my friends are snowboarding in Mt Oregon back in America and I’m out here in Melbourne showing a film. I’m doing a lot of different things that I would never have expected to in the past,” he says.
The Crash Reel first got off the ground when Pearce met Academy-Award nominated filmmaker Lucy Walker (Waste Land) at a Nike conference for extreme sports athletes.
Walker expressed her interest in making a film on Pearce, even though his accident had taken place around two years prior.
“It’s interesting how it all worked because I was so lucky to have met Lucy but we actually didn’t meet until two years after the accident, and so a lot had already happened. Luckily so many of my family and friends had filmed things as we went along… It was so great how much footage there was. It’s like we had to go through huge kind of puzzle to find this footage and then Lucy came in and filmed those last scenes which are so important,” Pearce says.
Many of those scenes centre on Pearce’s family, who are understandably concerned about Pearce’s desire to get back on a snowboard.
Watching these sequences later proved to be an emotional experience for Pearce, who still struggles with memory loss.
“It’s just intense, to see how much I’ve put people through. It’s wild to see the whole road. There’s so much of it I don’t recall.
“It was so eye opening. It just made me think, ‘Oh sh-t, you were really, really injured and in a really bad shape,’ and it’s so fortunate that I had a family who could tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing. Because at that stage I was unable to guide myself.
“My family is – they’re beyond incredible. Beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I am so grateful and so lucky.
“I’m super happy with how [the film] came out, mostly because how honest and real it is. I think it portrayed us in an authentic good way and it shows how our family is, and that is how we work. I think it’s pretty cool see a successful family like that.”
Though snowboarding as a career is strictly off limits for Pearce, he is at the stage where he can (tentatively) hit the slopes again. (Walker captures his first time back on a snowboard in the film.)
“Things are going well. Things are going amazing. I have a lot to go and a long way to continue to heal, and in a way I still have to come to terms with that , that life’s not back to where it used to be and I still have work to do.
“But snowboarding is in [my life] and in in a whole new way. It’s amazing how different it is.”
The Crash Reel was released on DVD in Australia on August 7.