When Jonathan Sigworth, 23, talks about shooting his first documentary in India with an inexperienced crew, he doesn’t make it sound difficult. In fact, he makes it sound a little prosaic, if troublesome. Maybe that’s because every day life is complicated enough for him; Sigworth is a quadriplegic. He is without feeling in most of his body, including his fingers and below his chest.

Sigworth was studying in India in 2006 when he fell off a cliff while biking. He might have died if he hadn’t landed right near a hospital and been noticed by some workers out for a smoke, as he recounts in the film, More Than Walking, which will show at the Woods Hole Film Festival in early August.

Recovering from the injury, “I knew right away that my accident was opening doors that I had never thought about before,” Sigworth remembered. “As an American being injured in India and seeing the conditions there, I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself. So I immediately saw that this injury was going to have some purpose in it.”

Some of that purpose would reveal itself when, back in America, Sigworth started playing wheelchair rugby, which caught national attention with the 2005 documentary Murderball. Back in India, however, friends from the same rehabilitation center were struggling with daily activities like getting out of bed. In India, a lack of resources and information has a concrete effect on the lives of quadriplegics, according to Sigworth: “Quadriplegics like myself are rehabilitated the same way that paraplegics are.” The documentary was a way to reach out to people like him in India. “Really, our end goal was to promote knowledge. There’s a lot of ignorance about what’s possible with a spinal-cord injury.”

In spring and summer of 2008, he found a small crew, most of whom had “no film experience whatsoever.” After some planning (“if you can call it planning”), they went in the fall of that year. Sigworth himself had some experience editing, but this would be his biggest project to date and his first documentary. He had never managed a crew before.

“My default was to give the cameras to my friends, and say, ‘Hey, guys, we’re going here, and shoot what you can without shooting each other,’” Sigworth explained. “We didn’t really know what the story was going to be while we were filming.” It wasn’t the best plan, he now realizes: “If you’re planning on directing a film, you need to give people directions.” One person wanted a shot list, but Sigworth didn’t know what one was.

“I’m not sure we got better as we went along. I think people got fed up with me as went along,” he said.
Sigworth was in some of the scenes himself, demonstrating to quadriplegics skills such as how to get out of bed efficiently. “At first I didn’t want to involve myself,” he said. But what was driving the return to India was also driving the film. Talking to his friends was part of the point. “The problem was that the connecting link was me, and my interactions with them.”

That meant being a director and a subject, he said: “It was like trying to play two roles at once…I spent a lot time wishing I could be behind the camera or in front of it, but not both. Preferably behind the camera. Sometimes it feels contrived, because you’re filming but you’re also pushing events along.”

When he went to edit the film, it was a challenge working in his story with the others. “Each little vignette needed to have a beginning middle and end, and the end of one needed to connect to the beginning of another,” Sigworth recalled.

Shooting in India also had special challenges for a quadriplegic. Sigworth takes more time than an able-bodied person doing daily tasks, such as getting showered and ready in the morning, which normally takes him two hours at home in the U.S. He couldn’t bring all his normal equipment. “The main difficulty in India is because we’re travelling so light, there are things I can normally do myself that I need help with,” he told me. “Some days, you just don’t take a shower.” And sometimes, he had bladder control issues: “You wet your pants, and it can take you two hours to change your clothes.”

Another problem being quadriplegic in India: you can’t sweat.

Even so, he was better off than many of his Indians counterparts, being an American with many more resources. “I’m conscious of that all the time, and it’s a source of anxiety to me.” There are mitigating factors, however. “What levels the playing field is that fact that I’m suffering from the same injury as these people are,” Sigworth said. “When I interact with people, we talk about catheters, and how do you keep a bowel program.”

And improving quadriplegics’ lives doesn’t always mean technology that Indians can’t afford. “Knowledge that we’re sharing isn’t primarily, ‘You need to buy this equipment, you need to buy this wheelchair.’ It’s primarily techniques — how to get from the bed to the wheelchair.” A bigger concern as an American interacting with Indians was the culture. “India’s very family-oriented. If there’s a family that won’t let their son who is 30 out of the house to get a job because they’re ashamed of him, you can’t just tell him to rebel.”
Sometimes in interviews, Sigworth felt as though he were prying: “This whole time I was very self-conscious, constantly feeling like we were imposing on the people we were interviewing.” But his personal connection to the subjects of the film gave the interviews a lot of personal meaning for Sigworth. For example, Navin is an exceptionally independent and ambitious quadriplegic.

“One thing I was very disappointed about was when I interviewed Navin, I told him, ‘Can you describe a moment…that was the darkest moment since you had an injury?’ And essentially, he said he didn’t have one, which I didn’t believe. So it was very refreshing when we interviewed Rahul.”