Sundance review: 'Crip Camp' is a warm, insistent telling of how kids became activists

‘Crip Camp’

★★★1/2

Playing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 107 minutes.

Screens again: Friday, Jan. 24, 8:30 a.m., The MARC (Park City; Friday, Jan. 24, 6 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City); Saturday, Jan. 25, 9 p.m. Resort (Sundance); Wednesday, Jan. 29, 6 p.m., PC Library (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 9:30 p.m., Redstone 1 (Park City).

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At once nostalgically celebratory and politically urgent, the documentary “Crip Camp” is a beautiful example of how a small act can have huge consequences.

Directors Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht start with what LeBrecht did in 1971, when he was 15 years old: He went to summer camp in New York’s Catskills. What made this remarkable is that LeBrecht was born with spina bifida, could not (and cannot) use his legs, and the camp, Camp Jened, was one of the first such facilities to cater to children with disabilities.

For LeBrecht, and many other campers, Camp Jened was a place where the kids could be kids — and hang out with other kids like them, a welcome relief from the isolation that being disabled often meant in an era when schools and businesses were unwelcoming to the disabled.

For a good 40 minutes, the movie shows us the joy these kids had going to camp. Then the story pivots, to show how summers at Camp Jened changed these kids’ worlds — and the world as a whole.

Many of the camp’s alumni left New York for the San Francisco Bay area, encouraged by one of the first adopters, Judy Heumann, a camp counselor who became an activist for the rights of the disabled. Heumann saw it as a civil rights movement, and borrowed language used from the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In 1973, activists got language into federal law to ban the federal government from discriminating against the disabled — but the law languished, with no enforced regulations to give it teeth. Four years later, a protest organized by Heumann and others led to the occupation of the San Francisco branch office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. The activists’ demand was for President Jimmy Carter’s HEW secretary, Joseph Califano, to enact meaningful regulation to uphold the law.

Through warm-hearted interviews and a wealth of archival footage — the camp’s operators, being a bunch of hippies, filmed everything — that Newnham and LeBrecht thoughtfully and lovingly stitch together into a heartfelt, insistent tale that should inspire anyone to fight the good fight.