January 15, 2021The Reason I Jump

Welcome to the Virtual Cinema House, a program of RCA @ Home.

Join us as we bring you exclusive access to first run and award-winning documentaries, not available on any other platform or media in Canada.

The Virtual Cinema House offers new documentary releases each week. For less than $10 per film, you can watch your selected films for up to 5 days.

The following film is available beginning January 15, 2021.

The Reason I Jump 

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

Naoki Higashida’s descriptions of a world without speech provoke us to think differently about autism. For most of history, nonspeaking autistic people have been considered less than human: ostracized within communities, banished to institutions, even in some ages and places, killed en masse. Stigma is still a feature of most autistic people’s lives.

But Naoki’s evocative descriptions of the maelstrom of thoughts, feelings, impulses and memories which affect his every actions lead us, as David Mitchell writes in his introduction to The Reason I Jump, to understand that “inside the... autistic body is a mind as curious, subtle and complex as any.” Naoki debunks the ideas often held about the autistic spectrum — that at one end there are geniuses and at the other fools. Instead he describes a magnificent constellation of different ways of experiencing reality, which for the most part, are filtered out by the neurotypical world.

For a filmmaker, this offers an opportunity to use the full potential of cinema to evoke these intense sensory worlds in which meaning is made through sounds, pictures and associations, as well as words. While no film can replicate human experience, my hope is that THE REASON I JUMP can encourage an audience into thinking about autism from the inside, recognizing other ways of sensing the world, both beautiful and disorientating. I hope the film takes audiences on a journey through different experiences of autism, leaving a strong sense of how the world needs to change to become fully inclusive.

– JERRY ROTHWELL, 2019

 

Director: Jerry Rothwell

Year: 2021

Runtime: 82 minutes

Country: United States, United Kingdom

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