This documentary adaptation of Naoki Higashida’s memoir is an immersive sensory exploration of non-verbal autism.
Naoki Higashida’s 2007 memoir ‘The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism’ was embraced by parents of non-verbal neurodiverse children as a way of bridging the communication gap between them. This poetic documentary adaptation from director Jerry Rothwell acts as a visual accompaniment, a means of espousing the same ideas in a more widely accessible but still impressively crafted form.
Excerpts from David Mitchell and KA Yoshida’s English translation of Higashida’s book (narrated by Jordan O’Donegan) are played, along with Mitchell’s talking head testimony as the parent of an autistic child, over sequences of a young boy representing Higashida (Jim Fujiwara) embarking on a journey. This acts as a visual metaphor for the book’s fictional narrative, and is intercut with the stories of five non-verbal autistic people, each of whom illustrate a different point about the condition that neurotypical audiences may be unaware of.
Among them are two young adults in Virginia, Benjamin McGann and Emma Budway, who relay their personal thoughts through an alphabet board, as well as Amrit Khurana, an artist from Noida who has found success in expressing herself through line drawings, and Jestina Penn-Timity, a girl living in Sierra Leone where being autistic carries a horrible social stigma. (Jestina’s mother gravely admits at one point, “Kids like ours, if they’re alive they’re the lucky ones”.)
As an autistic person, there are sections which almost play out like uncomfortable reminders of early childhood memories. In one scene we see another participant, Joss Dear, fall into a brief fit of aggression out of frustration from being unable to articulate himself.
The film’s palpable impact is heightened by Rothwell’s sensory approach. Cinematographer Ruben Woodin Dechamps employs tight close-up to emphasise how autistic people like me perceive things from an early age. Nick Ryan’s binaural sound design also adds to the immersion, calling to mind the work of sound designers such as Paul Davies and Johnnie Burn in its effectiveness.
At one point, McGann remarks, via a translator, “I think we can change the conversation around autism by being part of the conversation”. While this is ultimately a film designed for neurotypical audiences – the intensity of Ryan’s sound design may prove overwhelming to neurodiverse individuals susceptible to loud audio stimuli – I find myself coming back to that statement. According to a recent study, disabled creatives account for just seven per cent of British feature film projects accepted for development funding.
This is, of course, no fault of Rothwell’s deeply empathetic and cinematically stimulating filmmaking. It’s a fact that remains worth addressing and one I hope films like The Reason I Jump might be able to challenge. The examples it provides of autistic individuals functioning within an understanding support network dispel the notion that we are incapable of telling our own stories.
Published 17 Jun 2021
Heard great things but always approach films depicting autism with trepidation.
Viscerally compelling and stunningly accurate in its design.
Effective at conveying the sensory experience of neurodiversity while educating non-autistic viewers.
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