In Britain, teenager Joss is more verbal, but struggles to separate past traumas from present-day events, leading to volatile emotional swings before his parents (the film’s producers, Jeremy Dear and Stevie Lee) reluctantly place him in a residential school. In India, we meet Amrit, who channels her frustration at being unable to converse with others into vibrant drawings that illustrate her daily routines and encounters, and eventually net her a solo gallery show. Hagashida’s book lends a structural and spiritual spine to the film, with key extracts from the English translation - co-written by “Cloud Atlas” author David Mitchell - delivered in running voiceover, binding the otherwise diverse experiences of five subjects spread far across the globe. Buoyed by the enduring profile of its source material, “Jump” should complete a popular festival run disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic (though it recently played the digital edition of Hot Docs), to land comfortably in arthouses, streaming platforms and TV schedules alike. Rothwell’s film is most comparable to the BAFTA-nominated doc “Notes on Blindness” in its efforts to make cinematically immediate a condition that many imagine in blandly literal terms. Rather, it counts significantly on the viewer’s own capacity for empathy and interpretation, evoking autism through impressionistic detail instead of pedantic medical explanation. It’s easy enough to see how “The Reason I Jump” nabbed an audience award at Sundance in January - it’s as emotionally piercing as it is beautiful to behold - but that’s not to say the film plays to the gallery.

Naoki the reason i jump