He would love to experience – even if only for 10 seconds – how his autistic son experiences the world, says a parent in The Reason I Jump† And that’s what Jerry Rothwell’s documentary aims to accomplish through Naoki Higashida’s bestseller of the same name, who wrote down his own experiences with autism at age 13. The somewhat esoteric voice-over (people with autism are ‘envoys from another world’) consists of excerpts from the Japanese book, translated by the English writer David Mitchell (father of a son with autism). This is how you guide The Reason I Jump the viewer along families with children with autism, in various corners of the planet. Fascinating, and cleverly made insightful: how autism is associated with a completely different sensation of memory, time, image and sound.
The Reason I Jump
Documentary
Directed by Jerry Rothwell
82 min., in 28 halls.
