The 23rd British Independent Film Awards took place virtually on Thursday night and a host of celebrities appeared via video link to celebrate the occasion.
Zendaya, 24, and Priyanka Chopra, 38, were among some of the glam attendees who presented at the awards.
Actress Zendaya wore a graphic print top under a blazer, while Priyanka opted for a statement layered oversized white shirt.
Showbiz: Zendaya (pictured) and Priyanka Chopra appeared via video link to present at the 23rd British Independent Film Awards on Thursday
Bringing the glam: Priyanka Chopra Jonas presented Best Director to Remi Weekes
The Best British Independent Film was awarded to coming-of-age drama Rocks by Zendaya.
The Reason I Jump: behind a groundbreaking film on autism Adrian Horton
The cinematic language of The Reason I Jump, an ambitious documentary which attempts to simulate the sensory experience of non-verbal autism, is elemental, building up one isolated detail at a time. A living room, for example, emerges from the cascading, metallic tide of an electric fan, from the frisson of sizzling oil in a frying pan, from the wafting glow of sunlight refracted through a plastic water bottle. The scene is an act of double translation: Naoki Higashida’s book of the same name, written when he was 13 years old to map his experience of non-verbal autism, reimagined by film-maker Jerry Rothwell into a cinematic approximation of autistic perception – the sensory overwhelm, the hyper-intensity of details, the destabilizing fluidity of memory – for a neuro-typical audience.
A scene from the documentary The Reason I Jump. First published in Japan in 2007, “The Reason I Jump” is a memoir written by Naoki Higashida when he was 13-years-old. A nonverbal person with autism, Higashida made use of an alphabet grid his mother developed that allowed him to communicate the thoughts he was never able to express verbally. His words provided an impressionistic, first-person account of living with autism, as the young author attempted to explain to a neurotypical audience what it’s like to see the world through his eyes.
Later translated into English in 2013 by author David Mitchell (“Cloud Atlas”) and his wife K. A. Yoshida, who themselves have a child on the autism spectrum, the book would go on to be translated into 30 different languages and become an international bestseller.