“This is not a film about disability as much as it's a universal story about the struggle for freedom and simply the ability to live a chosen life.” 

--- Crip Camp co-director James LeBrecht  

In the early seventies Jim LeBrecht spent summers at Camp Jened, lovingly and irreverently dubbed “Crip Camp” by the disabled teens who thrived there. This past year, LeBrecht and his fellow director Nicole Newnham were nominated for an Oscar, and received a 2021 duPont-Columbia Award for their tender and fierce portrait of the camp, those teen campers, and the adult civil rights warriors they became. 

In a conversation with duPont Director Lisa R. Cohen - where they learned they had won - LeBrecht and Newnham recounted their six year challenge to combine history, narrative and civil rights advocacy lesson with humor, passion and an insider perspective that they say doesn’t get nearly enough of a voice. 

In production, LeBrecht and Newnham refused to feed into what Newnham calls the media’s “charity model” approach to portraying the disabled community. Instead, they describe the film’s unique narrative structure that immersed the audience into camp life, which highlighted the shared humanity and vulnerability of its young subjects, including LeBrecht himself.

Halfway through the film, as the campers grow up, it turns into a fascinating civil rights lesson that spotlights the struggle of the largest minority group in the United States, who marched, conducted marathon sit-ins, and successfully lobbied for their basic rights. 

“The structure in our hearts was sort of like the camp is like a stone thrown in the water and the movement is kind of rippling outward from that,” said Newnham.

The conversation ranges from the painful stigma surrounding disabilities, how the Black Panthers played a part in promoting disability rights, and what it was like to get notes from the former President and First Lady of the United States.

The conversation was also recorded with video - view select excerpts below. 

You can view the duPont Award winning documentary, here.