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
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