Film takes viewers into world of autism
About 10 years ago, a 13-yearold Japanese boy named Naoki Higashida wrote a book with thoughts of explaining how he experienced the world. “The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-year-old Boy With Autism” was a landmark exposition of how it feels to be a nonspeaking autistic person, often misunderstood, historically mistreated.
Novelist David Mitchell and his wife, Keiko Yoshida, who have a son with autism, translated the book into English.
And now it’s a film, opening today through the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s MFAH Virtual Cinema portal. Directed by Englishman Jerry Rothwell and featuring five nonspeaking people with the developmental disorder from around the world, from Virginia to Sierra Leone, the film is lyrical and innovative in its camera work and sound design, an immersive dive into a world most of us will never know.
As Higashida wrote in his book, “There’s a gap between what I’m thinking and what I’m saying. It’s like a reflex reacting to what I’ve just seen in some cases. Or to some old memories. As if I’m drowning in a flood of words.”
Rothwell, speaking via Zoom from England, is aware that those not on the autism spectrum have trouble wrapping their brains around such concepts.
“Neurotypicals are rubbish at anything outside the realm of the neurotypical,” he says, using the clinical term. “The book taught me a lot. It has these amazing depths to it, relating to sights and sounds and also with memory. It presents autism as a sensory way of experiencing the world.”
We follow the five featured characters through school and
play, mixed with footage of a Japanese boy representing Higashida (who chose not to participate in the film). When Jestina, from Sierra Leone, observes a group of caterpillars on a tree, we hear them shift and crawl as if they were next to our ear. When Ben, from Virginia, spells out sentences with a letter board, we feel the energy and urgency behind every jab of his finger.
Rothwell had some familiarity with his subject going into the project. In the ’90s, he set up
participatory media projects focused on disability rights and self-advocacy by people with learning disabilities. His 2008 documentary “Heavy Load” told the story of a punk band with autistic members.
“I’ve always been disturbed by society’s response to nonspeaking autistic people, who are constantly underestimated with labels like ‘severe’ and ‘lowfunctioning,’ which, as well as being misleading about people’s capacity to think and understand, also indicates a kind of hopelessness which increases marginalization,” he says.
“The Reason I Jump,” which won the world cinema documentary audience award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, is both advocacy and art. There’s nothing dry about it, nor anything condescending. It’s a rare perspective into the world we all share, a gentle but admirably firm request for compassion we’d all do well to heed.