LFF 2020 - The Reason I Jump
LFF It is often difficult to portray autism on screen, regardless of whether or not the film in question is aiming for a narrative based form or a documentary format. With this in mind, The Reason I Jump stands as an ambitious and crucial documentation of the experiences of non-speaking autistic people face every day.
Based upon the memoirs of 13-year-old Naoki Higashida, who wrote the novel to try and detail the experiences that they themselves had lived through as a non-speaking autism sufferer, The Reason I Jump offers an entirely unique type of adaptation. The documentary opens with some brief explanations of what the source material is, delivered by the memoirs translators themselves, before shifting focus towards five young people around the world, focussing on their experiences in detail. The aforementioned memoirs are always present within the documentary, often used as a narrative through line that carefully takes the viewer from story to story, while ensuring the experiences are rooted back to the original source material with narration often reading excerpts verbatim, contextualising the on screen images.
Director Jerry Rothwell conveys such a deep understanding for not only the source material, but also the various families that make-up the films short run-time, for whom there is a clear empathy that so many documentaries have struggled with in the past. Perhaps this is nowhere clearer than in the audio-visual construction of the film, with the sound design being manipulated in such a way to allow Rothwell to truly give a viewer insight into the often-intense surroundings of those details. Sounds are amplified, muffled and distorted in various ways, often changing depending on who the film is following at that given moment, giving light to the vast spectrum that autism finds itself on, ensuring the film never once claims to be the definitive understanding of autism, as the film makes clear there truly can never be one.
Screen time is certainly split up as much as possible, yet the eighty-two-minute run-time is at times not enough to ensure all five young-adults stories are fully explored to the fullest extent, with some experiences being detailed more than others. Yet what is detailed here if often beautiful, creating a look into a world that so many may have struggled to relate to, yet as the film shows, can ultimately be accessed by the human passion for communication. Ben and Emma’s experiences in Virginia, as they find a whole new way to communicate with those around them is both inspiring and incredibly eye-opening, standing as merely one of these numerous eye-opening moments in the film, as it expertly displays stories that only the best documentaries can.
The Reason I Jump is truly ground-breaking documentary filmmaking. Taking the core revelations found within the films source material and contextualising these within very real and visceral examples. Director Jerry Rothwell creates one of the most ambitious and important documentaries of the year.
