The Sundance Film Festival was one of the last major international film events held before COVID-19 imposed its restrictions. While the pandemic has left the theatrical fate of many films screened there—and later in Berlin—uncertain, Netflix has moved quickly to offer subscribers an original documentary that won the audience prize in its category. It's Crip Camp (2020), co-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, which traces the rise of the American disability rights movement—a civil rights struggle far less known than those for Black Americans or women.
James Lebrecht, who directed the film with Nicole Newnham, is also one of its narrators and a central figure in the story. "I was born with spina bifida," he says early in the film as childhood photographs flash across the screen. "They didn't think I'd live more than a couple of hours. Apparently, I had other plans."
After a brief look at Lebrecht's childhood—woven together with the stories of others interviewed—we discover what brought all these people together: Camp Jened, a summer camp for people with disabilities that operated from 1951 to 1977. In the age of Woodstock and hippie culture, young people with mobility or intellectual disabilities were largely shut out from mainstream life. The unluckiest were confined to state institutions in appalling conditions. For many young people in the 1960s and 70s, Camp Jened offered something they could never find elsewhere: a real taste of youth, freedom, and belonging.
The camp's volunteers were often inexperienced hippies, but that hardly mattered. The goal was simple: have fun while surrounded by dozens of others facing similar challenges. For the first time, these young people felt part of a community rather than pushed to society's margins. Every kind of disability, no matter how severe, was welcomed. Everyone helped everyone. In those weeks, campers discovered what it meant to live in a true community—to belong without ever being left behind. Camp Jened was limited in time and space, but it sparked something far larger than itself.
Judy Heumann attended Camp Jened from age 9 to 18. She has spoken of those summer weeks—the joys shared, but also the rage and frustration that built as she and her peers realized how differently the world treated people with disabilities everywhere else. It was Heumann, along with some of her fellow campers, who became the face of the disability rights movement in America. Together, they fought for changes that seemed impossibly distant then: accessible buildings, accessible transportation, the right to work and live with dignity.
The film shows the brutal struggle of that political and social battle, and how it gradually transformed the nation, tearing down architectural and cultural barriers one hard-won victory at a time. It's a story most people have never heard, told here with the passion and energy of cinema that dares to imagine a better world. And it makes one truth clear: great change never happens alone.