Can a summer camp change the world? If you’re talking Camp Jened in upstate New York, a place that welcomed kids with disabilities for a generation, the answer is yes.
“It was a utopia,” camper Denise Sherer Jacobson recalls in Crip Camp, the Netflix documentary about Jened and how it helped spur the movement for disability rights. “When we were there, there was no outside world.”
For their film, directors Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht drew from remarkable footage shot at Jened in 1971 that illustrated just how groundbreaking the camp was. There, kids with disabilities were treated as people, not as broken objects without hope or purpose. Campers laughed, played, kindled romances and got to be themselves in an atmosphere of acceptance.
“What we tried to do was provide the kind of environment where teenagers could be teenagers,” camp director Larry Allison states in the film, “without all the stereotypes and the labels.
“It was a utopia,” camper Denise Sherer Jacobson recalls in Crip Camp, the Netflix documentary about Jened and how it helped spur the movement for disability rights. “When we were there, there was no outside world.”
For their film, directors Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht drew from remarkable footage shot at Jened in 1971 that illustrated just how groundbreaking the camp was. There, kids with disabilities were treated as people, not as broken objects without hope or purpose. Campers laughed, played, kindled romances and got to be themselves in an atmosphere of acceptance.
“What we tried to do was provide the kind of environment where teenagers could be teenagers,” camp director Larry Allison states in the film, “without all the stereotypes and the labels.
- 12/31/2020
- by Matthew Carey
- Deadline Film + TV
Crip Camp emerged from archival material shot by the People’s Video Theater, a group similar to Dziga Vertov Group, who documented movements for social feedback. The Pvt documented the first Women’s Liberation March in New York, the first Gay Pride March, and in the 1970s, Camp Jened, a summer getaway operated by hippies in Catskills, NY for disabled teens.
Co-directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker Nicole Newnham and film mixer and former camper Jim LeBrecht, Crip Camp follows, along with many other stories of his friends, Jim’s sexual and political awakening as a teen. It’s a well-documented story that culminates twenty years later with the passage Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
We spoke with Newnham and LeBrecht about the stigma of disabled people’s sexuality, how the nationwide straw ban discriminates against the disabled, and why the disabled community are often cut out of conversations about diversity in America.
Co-directed by Emmy-winning filmmaker Nicole Newnham and film mixer and former camper Jim LeBrecht, Crip Camp follows, along with many other stories of his friends, Jim’s sexual and political awakening as a teen. It’s a well-documented story that culminates twenty years later with the passage Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
We spoke with Newnham and LeBrecht about the stigma of disabled people’s sexuality, how the nationwide straw ban discriminates against the disabled, and why the disabled community are often cut out of conversations about diversity in America.
- 3/28/2020
- by Joshua Encinias
- The Film Stage
Produced by Michelle and Barack Obama and directed by Nicole Newnham with Jim LeBrecht, this indispensable documentary defines what it means to call a movie “inspiring.” Their raucous fist-bump of a film is a 1950s origin story about Camp Jened, affectionately nicknamed “Crip Camp,” a New York summer getaway for kids with disabilities. Located near Woodstock, the camp was basically run by inexperienced hippies, including founder Larry Allison, with their hearts in the right place. By the 1970s, Crip Camp had become a haven for kids, including LeBreacht (born with...
- 3/25/2020
- by Peter Travers
- Rollingstone.com
Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht’s feature documentary “Crip Camp” starts off like any other summer camp story: Kids of different backgrounds meet up, hook up, and fall into a series of youthful hijinks. The only distinction is that the residents of Camp Jened are teens with disabilities. But what “Crip Camp” uncovers about Camp Jened is that the site would eventually sow the seeds for a disability rights movement that would have long-lasting implications decades later.
LeBrecht had always wanted to tell a story about his time at Jened, a place where he found liberation, joy, and a sense of normalcy outside of his home. So when he met up with Newnham, a director he’d worked with for 15 years doing the sound design and mixing on her documentaries, the two started brainstorming on a project they could work on together. Newnham said she’d watched LeBrecht “spend a...
LeBrecht had always wanted to tell a story about his time at Jened, a place where he found liberation, joy, and a sense of normalcy outside of his home. So when he met up with Newnham, a director he’d worked with for 15 years doing the sound design and mixing on her documentaries, the two started brainstorming on a project they could work on together. Newnham said she’d watched LeBrecht “spend a...
- 3/16/2020
- by Kristen Lopez
- Indiewire
The saga of Camp Jened, the summer camp for disabled teens that took off in the early 1970s, has enough appeal to consume an entire movie: The annual Catskills event provided ostracized youth with the opportunity to experience a sense of normalcy — earnest, unfettered human connections — not to mention all the sex and drugs. However, while that gathering provides an appealing starting point for “Crip Camp,” it’s only the first chapter of a much longer story.
Directors Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht’s inspiring look at the roots of the disability rights movement tracks several of those campers through the ages — including LeBrecht himself — as they mature into activists empowered by the prospects of finding their voice in an ambivalent society. While the hodgepodge of footage and talking heads sometimes struggles to encapsulate the sprawling history at its center, the filmmakers avoid taking the sentimental nature of the story for granted.
Directors Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht’s inspiring look at the roots of the disability rights movement tracks several of those campers through the ages — including LeBrecht himself — as they mature into activists empowered by the prospects of finding their voice in an ambivalent society. While the hodgepodge of footage and talking heads sometimes struggles to encapsulate the sprawling history at its center, the filmmakers avoid taking the sentimental nature of the story for granted.
- 1/24/2020
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
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