Tag: autism

The Radio Amateur (El radioaficionado)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Nikolas (Falco Cabo) is a simple man with a big dream. Living in an area of Madrid with twice the unemployment level of the city’s average, he is too undemanding to even bother ask to finalise the contract at his job in a parking lot. On the other hand, he wants to fulfil his late mother’s dream by heading out to an island far north of the Basque region. He is obsessed with far-away places and loves nothing more than to sit on his radio, listening to people communicating with sailors.

It’s evident from the beginning that he is on the spectrum, unable to communicate with people in a normal way while wearing large industrial headphones to block out loud noises. It seems that radio language appeals to him because of its simplicity and specificity, tempting him towards the Basque seaside to find his old schoolfriend Ane (Usúe Álvarez) with that particular job. He asks her if she has a boat that can take him out; she does not, but introduces him to a seaside community to help fulfil his aim in exchange for a few days work. While he is talented at his boat-repair work, his mental difficulties come under a huge amount of strain when dealing with his new colleagues.

Told with great compassion, The Radio Amateur expertly portrays the way that hurt people can transmit their pain onto others, showing examples of both wanton and unintentional cruelty. Ane reminds Nikolas that when they were in school, he called her an ugly whore after she wouldn’t let him play with his yo-yo. While this was the outburst of a developmentally challenged child, this insult caught on with the rest of her schoolfriends, causing her lasting damage. Likewise, fellow boat-worker Lupo (Jaime Adalid) is wheelchair-bound but still the cruellest person around.

Cabo embodies Nikolas with a fine sensitivity and physicality. When playing characters with mental difficulties, many actors tend to overplay the physical tics. Cabo keeps it nice and simple, allowing most of his emotions, and especially his wounded nature, to play through on his face. Álvarez plays the only young woman in the film, providing a potential balm for Nikolas’ state with a fine sense of empathy that never feels clichéd or easily won, the film actually testing the limits of how compassion and love can make a difference when those they care for are suffering from severe mental difficulties.

First time director Iker Elorrieta is also the cinematographer behind the project, allowing the gorgeous, sun-dappled, oftentimes twilight-set scenery to do a lot of the heavy lifting. While he often relies a little too much on the surrounding beauty to carry the meaning of several scenes, he is at his most impressive when creating a sense of emotional immediacy through long hand-held takes. The sound design and score blend together nicely in these pivotal moments, knowing when to cut out or add musical emotion to a particular scene. The final result is a touching reverie on mental illness and the need to be respected by others.

The Radio Amateur plays in the First Feature Competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 12th – 28th November.

The Reason I Jump

Posted on by victorfraga

Many of us neurotypical people have a skewed understanding of autism. The general misconception is that autistic or neurodivergent people don’t possess well-developed mental faculties and have cognitive difficulties similar to mentally impaired patients. However, this is far from true. Many autistic children and adults are just limited by the constraints of verbal communication. Some might even have heightened sensory perceptions, deeper memory, and creative abilities far superior to “normal” people.

The Reason I Jump is a documentary based on the eponymous 2007 memoir written by Naoki Higashida, a nonverbal Japanese teenager with autism. Passages from the book – which was translated into English by novelist David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) and his wife, KA Yoshida (who have a child with autism themselves) – are interspersed in the film, and attempt to bridge the gap between a non-speaking autistic mind and the neurotypical world that has long struggled to understand them and too often neglected to try. Some may have thought Naoki had no emotion or imaginative intelligence, but his book proved otherwise. It revealed a mature introspection that conveyed his perspective with real insight and articulacy.

Naoki learned to communicate by pointing to letters on an alphabet board created by his mother. The author, now in his 20s, didn’t want to appear in the documentary himself but his words that illuminate his sensory perceptions, resonate throughout it. While draped with bits of narration from Naoki’s book that plays over dreamy footage of a Japanese-British autistic boy (Jim Fujiwara) wandering through the countryside, Jerry Rothwell’s film uses Naoki as more of a guiding light than a character, which allows it to bear out the book’s lessons away from the person who wrote it.

Naoki’s book is the spine of this documentary, his commentary relayed to us by narrator Jordan O’Donegan. With this context, Rothwell sets across the globe, capturing the lives of those with nonverbal autism. We meet Amrit, a painterly teenager from India whose line drawings constitute a visual diary of her day; Joss, a young man from Kent and the son of the film’s producers Stevie Lee and Jeremy Dear, who is acutely attuned to sound and light; Ben and Emma, hockey-mad high schoolers from Virginia; and Jestina, a mid-teen deemed a ‘devil’ and a ‘witch’ from Sierra Leone. The exploration of Jestina’s experience gestures toward a larger point. Her parents describe launching a public campaign to change attitudes in Sierra Leone, where centuries-old beliefs, rooted in fear, stigmatise autistic people as possessed by the devil.

This is a film about mapping that middle ground, and so it makes sense that Rothwell presents it in a way that tries to thread the needle between the experience of living on the spectrum and the experience of living with the spectrum, each of which can be confusing in its own way. Rothwell recognises that making assumptions about the inner lives of people who can’t express themselves can lead to grave inhumanities. He hopes that his documentary will open a window on ways of thinking that we often ignore and don’t understand and that makes us judge people in completely inappropriate ways.

The Reason I Jump is in cinemas on Friday, June 18th.