As a film fan, I have been delighted to be able to see film festivals even during the pandemic. It was in that capacity that a short documentary film titled Unspoken caught my eye. It’s about Emma Zurcher-Long, a girl with autism. The film screened at the Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year.

Executive produced by actress Vera Farmiga, the film is available at, and described on, Videoproject.com:

14-year-old Emma Zurcher-Long invites the viewer on her quest to enrich understanding of what it means to be human in this collaborative self-portrait that portrays her dynamic life as an autistic teenager. For years, Emma’s intelligence was continually underestimated as she struggled to communicate her feelings, needs, and fears to her friends and family. But for the first time in her life, her true voice is finally heard when she begins typing, seeing, and hearing the world in “hi-res, Technicolor, and surround sound”. Through her keyboard, Emma strengthens her connection with others, and her insightful writing is both a catalyst for, and a remedy to, the fear and misunderstanding that surrounds autism. Living in the beauty beyond spoken language, Emma is challenging the societal judgment surrounding autism, one keystroke at a time.

The film has many glowing reviews. Educational Media Reviews Online says it’s “Recommended [and] provides a fascinating glimpse into a unique style of communication … Inspirational and enlightening.” Rua Williams, in the Canadian Journal of Disability Studies, writes that “Emma and the entire Unspoken documentary team have committed themselves to activism in preservation of the human right to communication access.” Another reviewer, Katie Flynn, goes even further: “Unspoken is, quite possibly, one of the most important short films of our time.”

Curious to know more about Emma, I looked online and found plenty, including Emma’s Hope Book, 

a blog written by Emma. Occasionally she invites her parents, Ariane Zurcher and Richard Long, to contribute. This blog began as a document of what her parents thought, but when Emma began typing to communicate in the fall of 2012, she proved all those previously held assumptions wrong. Emma’s Hope Book is where Emma publishes her short stories, poems, insights, and opinions, particularly about autism. Emma wrote, “My mind talks heavy thoughts, but my mouth talks silliness.” Emma writes by typing on a keyboard synced with her iPad and wishes people would “listen to my writing voice, but they listen to my talking voice instead.”

At one point her mother says of Emma: “Here she was knowing how to read and write for many years but had no way of expressing it … When she started typing a year ago, it opened up all these minds.”

These comments—though superficially inspirational—raised more red flags for me. I’d heard that same sentiment, and identical phrasing, in materials about facilitated communication (FC), and it wasn’t the first time in an acclaimed documentary short film (see my piece “Academy Award-Nominated Film Promotes False Hopes” in the January/February 2005 SI).

In the 1980s and 1990s, many parents of autistic children turned to facilitated communication, which had been claimed to help autistic children communicate better. The idea behind FC is based on the premise that the lack of communication is not due to an underlying cognitive disorder but instead to motor disorders such as those affecting the ability to coordinate speech. What is needed, FC advocates claim, are trained facilitators to help the autistic children by holding their hands, fingers, or elbows while the child types on a keyboard or points to lists of letters, words, or symbols to communicate. In this way, the child can break through the tragic blockage of her disorder and speak, perhaps for the first time, to her parents and loved ones.

Yet the premise that communication problems in autistic patients came from speech motor dysfunction was unsupported by medical science. The messages that the autistic children were sending much more closely matched those of the facilitator than the child. The words, diction, nuances, and grammatical structures used in the messages frequently far exceeded what an autistic child could have learned. This, however, rarely deterred FC proponents, who stubbornly took this troublesome evidence instead as proof that doctors were underestimating the autistic children’s abilities—exactly as we see in Emma’s case.

So it was with a sense of both unease and déjà vu that I watched Unspoken. In the film, we see that Emma is the author of many inspirational or poetic quotes (many of which appear onscreen, such as “Piercing shards of past and present pain cause me to turn away or make faces or laugh out loud to lessen the weightiness”). Allegedly all the narrative in the film was written by Emma as well (or at least adapted from her writing). However, in her everyday interaction, she does not seem to exhibit anything resembling that level of diction. She’s also a singer and author of a book, and the film shows that Emma can clearly speak; she says several responsive and substantive comments in the film. She also clearly has good motor skills, which raises the question: Why is her mother holding a keyboard for her as she types?  

At some points Emma seems to be looking at the keyboard as she types, but at other times she doesn’t. The clips seen of her typing in the film are not long enough (whether intentionally or otherwise) to see whether she’s typing words or just a few letters at a time. There may well be better video available of her composing elsewhere, but if there isn’t that’s a red flag: Why wouldn’t there be a ten or fifteen minute video of her typing out an eloquent message? If she can speak well enough to sing and communicate with her family—not to mention codirect this film—why can’t she just dictate her messages to an assistant or even a voice-to-text program?

Given the carefully edited and presented footage, it wasn’t completely clear how (or to what extent) Emma was independently communicating, but it raised a strong suspicion that some variation of FC was at work. Numerous studies over three decades have failed to validate the claims of FC. Unspoken, as well as others, including the 2017 film Deej (see Janyce Boynton’s review in the January/February 2021 SI) may in fact document a miracle. Emma seems like a bright and lovely girl, and I sincerely wish her the best. But science and medical evidence suggest that FC is at play, and by leaving out information that casts doubt on the technique, these films may cruelly foster false hopes in friends and families of autistic children.