![]() ![]() ![]() Rothwell’s approach is the latter – for him and for his fellow contributors on this misguided film, the autistic experience is one that cannot be adequately depicted through simple observation. Others see fit to editorialize, sometimes for good reason and sometimes not. Some documentarians are content merely to observe. Now, Jerry Rothwell’s The Reason I Jump attempts to provide an insight into a milieu ostensibly familiar to most, yet in significant ways distinctly foreign: the life of an autistic person. Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda gave us the chance to observe life on a farm for a family of pigs, free from (almost) all human interaction. ![]() Chen Wei Xi and Wu Hao’s 76 Days placed us inside a Wuhan hospital at the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak early last year. Some of 2020’s best documentaries achieve such emotional proximity with aplomb, transporting the viewer into milieus entirely foreign to most of us. Of course, said spectator never truly experiences said lives, but the best cinema is shot through panes of empathy and compassion that bring us emotionally close to that which we cannot be physically close to. Whether depicting the quotidian or the extraordinary, the mundane or the fantastical, it offers the spectator an opportunity to experience the lives of others arguably better than any other medium. Cinema is a window into worlds we might otherwise never see. ![]()
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