Crip Camp(2020)
dir. Nicole Newnham & James LeBrecht
A summer camp that started a rights movement.
Where to watch: Streaming on NetflixLetterboxd ↗
In the early 1970s, a ramshackle summer camp for teenagers with disabilities near Woodstock, Camp Jened, ran on hippie rules: no adults in charge of the kids' lives. The campers, among them co-director James LeBrecht and the future activist Judy Heumann, went on to organize the sit-ins and protests that helped win the Americans with Disabilities Act. It was produced for Netflix and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Why it’s here
The film shows that a movement can begin as a summer. What's punk is that the people it follows organize without asking permission, and refuse to be treated as objects of pity. What's pedagogical is the through-line from a place where kids ran their own lives to a federal law that changed what was possible. It's a rare entry on disability and civil rights, and a natural fit for DoCR's self-organization principle.
Where This Film Lives
- Setting
- North America
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution
Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (eds.)
A tactics manual for making trouble well.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good
adrienne maree brown
Pleasure is the work.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Brave Girl: Clara and the Shirtwaist Makers' Strike of 1909
Michelle Markel
One girl stood up. Twenty thousand followed.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Care Work
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Access as radical love. Built by sick disabled queer people of color.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
Phillip Hoose
She refused first. History forgot her anyway.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Revolution for the Hell of It
Abbie Hoffman
Throw money at the Stock Exchange. Nominate a pig. Win.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
A is for Activist
Innosanto Nagara
The ABCs of raising hell.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Banned Book Club
Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada (art by Ko Hyung-Ju)
A secret reading group. A dictatorship. Real arrests.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST