The Reason I Jump

Grand Jury Award at Sundance
In 2007, Naoki Higashida, a non-speaking autistic 13-year-old in Japan, released the bestselling memoir The Reason I Jump. Taking this groundbreaking first-person account of a child’s experience of autism as his guide, award-winning filmmaker Jerry Rothwell dramatizes Higashida’s prose via an alter ego who shares what is in his mind and insights into his behaviour. These imaginative sequences are woven with chronicles of five other young non-verbal people with autism and their families, from India, Sierra Leone, the UK and USA. Amrit expresses her complex interior life through her drawings, while Ben is able to declare the infringement of his civil rights using an alphabet board. Taken together, these impressionistic and firsthand experiences powerfully communicate the frustrations and enormous challenges of living inside a body that cannot speak. (Source: Tiff)