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An immersive documentary inspired by Naoki Higashida’s groundbreaking book of poetry, Jerry Rothwell’s The Reason I Jump places us in the mind of nonverbal autistic children, focusing on the ways in which they navigate the world. The result is a poetic and experimental documentary made for the big screen, and thankfully I had the rare opportunity to see it that way when it premiered last year at Sundance, presented in a version mixed for Dolby Atmos, the 360-degree sound system.

Now arriving in Virtual Cinemas around the country via Kino Marquee and ahead of a release in Rothwell’s native UK once cinemas reopen, we talked with the director about his experience adapting Higashida’s book and launching the film at a time when cinemas are largely closed.

The Film Stage: Thinking of your previous works exploring man in nature, how did you come to adapt Naomi Higashida’s The Reason I Jump?...

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. The author, now in his 20s, didn’t want to appear in the documentary himself, Rothwell says, but his words resonate throughout it, words that illuminate his sensory perceptions.