5/26/2023 0 Comments The reason i jump![]() ![]() Unable to fully participate in a verbal conversation, he still mostly communicates with the method he used to write the book, painstakingly pointing to the roman alphabet on a handmade letter board to spell out Japanese hiragana syllables, gradually building up words and sentences. I didn’t want to make the film if I had any doubt about his authorship. The book certainly runs against the widely-held idea that autistic people lack a ‘theory of mind’ or that nonspeaking autistics are incapable of linguistic self-expression. ![]() Naoki’s teenage writing is fluent, mature and perceptive, which has led some of his reviewers to wonder how much his original words had changed through the process of transcription and translation. In this blog I look at my experience of researching and working with Naoki, his translators and other nonspeaking autistic writers – and why I came to the conclusion ‘Yes, he did’. And the question – one that has dogged Naoki since his book was first published in Japanese in 2007 – is whether he really is the author? The film’s starting point is the book of the same title by Naoki Higashida, an autistic Japanese boy, who wrote it when he was 12 years old. As our film The Reason I Jump travels to festivals before its wider release, an old question starts to surface. ![]()
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