The Reason I Jump

In 2007, the 13-year-old Japanese boy Naoki Higashida wrote the bestseller ‘The Reason I Jump’, in which he gave extraordinary insight into his experience as a non-speaking child with autism. With his documentary of the same name, award-winning filmmaker Jerry Rothwell uses the power of cinema and the insights drawn from the book to provide intimate portraits of five remarkable non-speaking autistic young people from various parts of the world. These are young people who experience reality in different ways and who have learned to express themselves, with the help of friends and family. The striking scenes impress, open the eyes and often coincide with the words of Naoki's book. Rothwell speaks volumes with this glorious film, winner of the Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category at Sundance 2020.

‘“Life-changing” is the kind of hyperbolic descriptor thrown around all too easily in the world of publishing, but it could quite reasonably be applied to Naoki Higashida’s nonfiction bestseller… Translating that perspective-shifting achievement to the screen is a tall order, but Jerry Rothwell’s documentary… does so with imagination and grace: Not so much a direct adaptation of Higashida’s book as an application of its insights… it finds supple visual and sonic language to bring sensory dimension to [the ASD] experience.’—Guy Lodge, Variety