 |
| Images courtesy of Kino Lorber |
Japanese non-speaking autistic person Naoki Higashida’s 2007
best-selling autobiography The Reason I Jump became a literary sensation
around the world in 2013 when it was translated by Keiko Yoshida and her
husband David Mitchell and has since been translated in over thirty other
languages. Something of a controversial
still debated text, it surmises the book’s author Higashida figured out how to
communicate using the largely scientifically disregarded method known as ‘facilitated
communication’. Purporting to assist
disabled people with the use of letters and a keyboard handheld by an ‘expert
facilitator’, the text eventually wound up inspiring a play from the National
Theatre of Scotland as the book was at once met with praise from autism
advocacy groups and scorn from skeptics.
As to whether or not Higashida himself actually wrote the book or with
the help of his parents remains open to debate and for some taints the noble
efforts of documentary filmmaker Jerry Rothwell’s revolutionary nonfiction
piece The Reason I Jump which expands upon the conversation opened up in
the original text.
While the book was a memoir largely comprised of questions
asked of Higashida as well as many others dealing with autism, the film takes a
more immersive interactive approach to the material. While the actual Naoki Higashida never appears
onscreen, in his place are five non-speaking autistic children from around the
world including but not limited to a talented artist from India named Amrit,
Ben and Emma from the US, Joss from Britian and Jestina from Sierra Leone. Cross-cutting freely between the disparate
characters as an omniscient voiceover narrator reads sections from the text
itself, often fluctuating in and out of innovatively rendered Dolby Atmos audio
designed to simulate what it sounds like to hear and experience the world
through the ears of an autistic person, The Reason I Jump becomes
something of a documentary film tapestry.
At one point in the story even the book’s English translator David
Mitchell shows up explaining the significance of making the text available to
global readership.
Filmed in scope 2.35:1 in 4K digital intermediate by Granny
Project cinematographer Ruben Woodin Dechamps and adorned with an
experimental atonal score by documentary composer Nainita Desai mixed across
the soundstage in 8-channel Atmos, to watch The Reason I Jump is to
allow your senses to go on a wholly original sonic journey. Akin to György Pálfi’s Hukkle also
wordless and largely designed around the notion of pure sound, the voiceover
narration comes through clearly while naturalistic sounds we commonly hear
everyday are amplified in such a way you can understand the overwhelming
anxieties a neurodivergent person must feel.
Also on full display is the anger and frustration that comes from not
being able to express oneself clearly or quickly, a common trait shared among
all the characters in the saga. A movie which
puts on a new subset of goggles and headphones which posit you in an ear space
you’ve never listened to before, The Reason I Jump debatably joins
Viktor Kossakovsky’s pure water documentary Aquarela as an endeavor of
pure sound and striking vistas to tell its story.
Whether or not you agree with the philosophical or
contextual leanings of the text which still engenders detractors and skeptics
balking at the scientific validity of facilitated communication, as a
documentary film experience there isn’t anything exactly like it sound wise or
conceptually. For some viewers going in
with their minds made up on it, people will come away indifferent to what is
largely a collection of pretty pictures of nonspeaking autistic children
existing and trying to communicate. For
others uninitiated with this world and consciousness, it proved to be an enthralling
sensory experience like no other.
Released in 2020 to sadly largely virtual screenings due to the outbreak
of COVID-19, not many viewers were able to hear the film as intended. But for those with strong amplifiers at home,
the Kino Lorber blu-ray disc will give your theaters one Hell of a workout with
its immersive sound design.
--Andrew Kotwicki
