Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution Highlights Landmark Rights Struggle in Upbeat Voice
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
It's always presumptuous to refer to a slice of history as "little known" simply because you didn't know about it, but it's probably safe to say that Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution — a rousing look at disability rights — will tell a new story to a lot of people.
Filmmakers Nicole Newnham and Jim Lebrecht.
The film, which airs on Netflix March 25, is a savvy mix of inspiration, history lesson, and consciousness-raising that starts in a Catskills' summer camp run by hippies for disabled kids.
Crip Camp is the second feature — after the Oscar-winning American Factory — supported by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground production company in conjunction with Netflix. The deliberately provocative title refers to Camp Jened, a residential summer camp for children and teens with disabilities, which operated near Woodstock, New York, in the late sixties and early seventies and which, the film argues, became the launch pad for the disabilities rights movement.
Crip Camp is co-directed by Nicole Newnham (The Revolutionary Optimists) and sound designer Jim Labrecht, a former camp resident who uses a wheelchair, and who had worked with Newnham as crew on previous films. The Obama connection is also personal. Another former resident, Judy Heumann, was a schoolteacher who became a disability rights leader and later a special advisor on disability rights in the Clinton and Obama administrations.
The movie owes a big debt to some remarkable archival footage, shot in the early seventies by the People's Video Theatre, a collective project that helped the residents voice their experiences and encourage them to play sports, music, date and express their political anger. The mood of the film's first half is light though it reminds us that these kids were far from the worst-off treated people in the disability spectrum: there are brief and appalling clips from a Peabody Award–winning 1972 series by Geraldo Rivera investigating the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island.
The residents of Camp Jened, mostly white teens from the New York City area (one African-American camp counsellor also participates in the film) found a new shared identity in the camp, and common experiences of over-protective parents, denial of access to public institutions, and dehumanizing interpersonal interactions.
Not surprisingly for teens, sexuality was on their minds. Co-director Lebrecht, who first appears a camera as a cute 15-year-old Grateful Dead devotee, remembers madly making out his first girlfriend all over the camp, until a lice infestation curtailed their fun. Denise Sherer Jackson, a sexual therapist with cerebral palsy, recalls how she determinedly lost her virginity to a bus driver. Later, she had her appendix removed by a doctor who failed to diagnose her gonorrhea. To capture both the utopian spirit and political turmoil of the era, the movie includes Woodstock-era music — Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth, Richie Havens’ Freedom and Neil Young’s Sugar Mountain.
The second half of the movie marks a change to a more serious tone as it focuses on the struggle to turn ideals into realities. Several former camp residents ended up heading to California, going to college at Berkeley, and further heightening their political awareness. In 1973, under legal pressure, the U.S. Congress passed the Rehabilitation Act: Section 504 was intended to ensure equal access to all civic rights to people with disabilities.
But there was no mechanism for enforcing the law and considerable resistance to taking on the extra costs of installing ramps, bathrooms and educational rights of people with disabilities. Basic rights to accessibility continued to be treated as unrealistic and inconvenient (the Carter administration does not come off well here.) The message, says one of the campers turned activists, was that society would be happier if disabled people just died.
In 1977, activists led protests around the country, closing downtown New York in a wheelchair protest and sit-ins around the country of the government offices. The most dramatic of these protests was the protest led by Judy Heumann of the U.S. offices of Health, Education and Welfare Department, for almost a month, in which more than 100 people with disabilities, without air-conditioning, proper bathroom facilities or food, refused to leave until they were heard.
They were supported by gay rights groups, unions, and The Black Panthers, who brought meals. The protestors improvised their own refrigerator, delegated responsibilities and, in general, showed the resourcefulness of people who had been used to camping out.
Another film on this subject could have been much angrier or at least, caught us up to the current failures of disability rights. But Crip Camp is a buoyant and celebratory story and in keeping with the Obama political style, the emphasis on grassroots activism and shaping the positive narrative.
Like a good stump speech, one can feel the strings being pulled and still enjoy the effect with a film that is smartly calculated to make audiences feel proud about the fight against injustice rather than shame about the past.
Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution. Directed and written by Jim Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham. With Jim Lebrecht, Judith Heumann, and Denise Sherer Jacobson. Available on Netflix on March 25.