Exploring Autism From A New Viewpoint

Meet Filmmaker Robert Rooy

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The opening of “Deej,” the fascinating documentary by Robert Rooy, is a swirl of color, reflecting the internal creative mind of David James (“DJ”) Savarese, a nonspeaking autist who is the subject of this film.

Abandoned by his birth parents as a child, most people wrote DJ off due to his inability to talk.

But his adoptive parents worked patiently with him, teaching him to communicate, and equipped him with a text-to-speech synthesizer, which allowed him to converse a la Stephen Hawking. And they encouraged him to pursue an education, unlocking his talent for poetry and other writing.

Filmmaker Rob Rooy (pronounced “Roy”) follows DJ through high school and into college, capturing his progress, frustrations, and developing future goals.

“Deej” is showing next Monday at Tropic Cinema. This being one of the films curated for this year’s Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, Rooy will be on hand to introduce his documentary and answer questions from the audience.

[Buy tickets for the February 19 screening/Q&A here]

While attending Yale Drama School, Rooy became interested in film. Having grown up in the middle of Iowa, he’d never seen a movie until he was 17. At Yale, he joined film societies and watched movies. He’d found his medium.

After graduating, Rooy moved to the West Coast to take part in the Assistant Director Training Program, a two-year course in moviemaking. That led to working on forty Hollywood films and television programs as an assistant director as well as producing and directing short documentaries for non-profits.

About ten years ago he heard an NPR program that profiled an autistic boy in Iowa. He found the story intriguing. So on his next visit home, he made a side trip to Grinnell, a small town in Iowa near where Rooy grew up.

Arranging to make contact, he met first with DJ Savarese’s adoptive father. When DJ and his parents first agreed to be filmed, the boy asked via his text-to-speech synthesizer, “Are you here to help me save my people?”

Rooy admits he hemmed and hawed, his goal being to make an observational documentary. “At first, I was a little worried about selling something; it was clear DJ was all about advocacy.”

So they started out slow, with “very low key, very sporadic filming.” “Generally speaking, over time we achieved a solid comfort level,” he says with a sense of accomplishment.

Rob Rooy was a one-man crew, handling the camera, editing, piecing the story together. But then he and DJ decided they should break new ground by sharing editorial control. DJ came aboard as Rob’s fellow producer, helping guide the film. And doing the voice over in his computerized voice, commenting on the events and how he felt at the time it was taking place.

“Deej” is sprinkled with DJ’s poetry, lyrical interludes that are at the same time haunting and personal. Each such segment is awash with swirling bursts of color to match the words. This animation is the work of Em Cooper, a British animation director specializing in creating impressionistic oil-painted animation.

As the story unfolds we watch DJ’s frustration at setbacks and elation at successes as he makes it through high school, wins honor awards, and applies to Oberlin, a leading liberal arts college. His mother joins him at college, much as she did during high school, overseeing and augmenting the assistants assigned to help him with his synthesizer, raising his hand with each keystroke, a necessity to reset his physical responses to typing.

“It’s a different pace of conversation,” says Rooy. “It takes time.”

This slow back-and-forth process was evident in the editing process of the film. “I’d go visit DJ and his parents every two or three months and come away with lots of footage. Then I’d do a preliminary edit and post it online for DJ to review and add his commentary.”

Making “Deej” took about six years to shoot, followed by a couple of years editing. “We finished about a year ago,” says Rooy.

DJ graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Oberlin College in May 2017 with a double major in Anthropology and Creative Writing. An ASAN Scholar Fellow, he was also the recipient of Oberlin’s William Battrick Poetry Fellowship and their Comfort Starr Award for meritorious scholarly work in Anthropology.

His poems and prose have appeared in The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Prospect, Disability Studies Quarterly, StoneCanoe, and Voices for Diversity and Social Justice: A Literary Education Anthology, among other venues.

DJ Savarese is now a Fellow at Open Society Foundations Youth Exchange/Human Rights Initiative, working to make literacy-based education, communication, and inclusive lives a reality for all nonspeaking people.

DJ sees this film as a teaching tool. While Rooy takes “Deej” on a tour of the Southern Circuit, his co-producer is making his own public appearances, advocating for the importance of inclusion and access to communication.

You’ll like meeting DJ on film. And Rob Rooy in person.

Note: As one of 20 South Arts Screening Partners, Tropic Cinema will be hosting three Southern Circuit screenings as part of the 2017-18 season.