Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (2020) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM about the summer camp that helped spark America's disability rights movement. In the early 1970s, just down the road from the Woodstock site, Camp Jened welcomed teenagers with disabilities.

Inside its run-down cabins, nobody treated a kid in a wheelchair as a burden. They were listened to, argued with, seen as ordinary teens for the first time — music, crushes, arguments that ran past midnight. Directors Jim LeBrecht, a former camper himself, and Nicole Newnham weave grainy archival reels with the later lives of those campers.

And those campers grew into organizers. Judith Heumann and her friends would go on to lead the landmark 1977 sit-in and push through the laws that paved the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act. Produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's company, the film was an Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature. It's a warm, funny, furious record of how the right to simply exist had to be fought for. Stream Crip Camp online on iFILM.