The new documentary The Reason I Jump begins with text on screen that explains the basis for the film: “Ten years ago a book by Japanese teenager, Naoki Higashida, revealed a previously hidden world.”That hidden world is the mental landscape of a non-speaking autistic youth, a variety of human experience that has often perplexed those who qualify as “neuro-typical.”“I thought…how has this book come into being?” director Jerry Rothwell remembers wondering. “And then I went to meet Naoki and Naoki is every bit as fluid and poetic and wise as the book would suggest.”Naoki learned to communicate by pointing to letters on a letter board, a painstaking process where, as Rothwell notes, “a sentence might take 10 minutes” to complete.
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