The book “turned on its head, really, a lot of understanding about non-speaking autism that has grown up over the last few decades”, Rothwell said. Mitchell, also the film’s co-screenwriter and father to a son who is on the spectrum, describes Higashida’s writing in the film as “cartography” for a neural experience he has witnessed but struggled to understand. Rothwell’s film, with the help of sound designer Nick Ryan and cinematographer Ruben Woodin Dechamps, ambitiously transmutes Higashida’s words into an evocative, conscientious portal into a world without speech, through the daily experience of five people with non-verbal autism. “My big hope is that by writing this book, I can explain in my own way what goes on in my mind,” wrote Higashida, his words recited in voiceover by Jordan O’Donegan as a young Japanese-British child (Jim Fujiwara) runs through a field.īetween a quarter to half of people with autism spectrum disorder experience some limitation of spoken language, from fully non-verbal to utterances. All Rights Reserved.The intention of The Reason I Jump, as both a book (originally published in Japanese in 2007 and translated into English six years later by a team including the Cloud Atlas novelist David Mitchell) and a film (which won an audience award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival) is explicitly didactic, a missive to explain one person’s neuro-divergent experience and a broader call to expand one’s imagination of human cognition. This is a documentary, not a dramatized version of factual history, so we’re getting news bulletins direct from hearts and minds.Ĭopyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Its newly expressive subjects have also been locked in, to varying degrees young people on the autism spectrum, they cannot or do not speak. Now another film joins the list, “The Reason I Jump” (in select and virtual theaters).

It includes “My Left Foot” (about the severely disabled writer and painter Christy Brown), “Awakenings” (long-catatonic victims of an encephalitis epidemic suddenly released from their frozen state) and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” (a French editor paralyzed except for his left eyelid by a rare condition called “locked-in syndrome”). The list starts with “The Miracle Worker” and Helen Keller trapped in her head until a young teacher finds a way to release her. Some of the most thrilling films I know have explored or discovered the intellectual and emotional life of people who cannot express what they’re thinking or feeling. Watch a clip from the documentary ‘The Reason I Jump,’ directed by Jerry Rothwell.

The reason i jump book review