Neurodivergent, Autistic Creators Change Film

The Stimming Pool is like nothing else you may have seen on the film festival circuit this year. Described as “a hybrid film that presents the possibilities of a world informed by autistic perspectives and perception,” the experimental movie from a group of British filmmakers features a “drifting form built around the concept of an autistic camera.”

As a synopsis explains: “The curiosity of this camera discovers a relay of subjects who stray through the world, revealing environments often hostile to autistic experience, such as a hectic workplace and a crowded pub, and quiet spaces that offer respite from them.”

The characters we meet on the way include a B-movie film club host, a young woman who fills out questionnaires and watches sequences in an eye-tracking test, an office worker who goes about life while masking their autistic nature, and an enigmatic dog-human spirit watching over people with disabilities whose story is told in a picture book.

“Like a Russian doll of Where’s Wally? (or Where’s Waldo? in the U.S.) scenes, the film invites the audience to take pleasure in exploring details in every part of the frame,” notes the synopsis. “Each of the characters exists in a separate world … But gradually we come to realize they have common experiences. Some are concealing their autism and dealing with the resulting feelings of isolation, while others thrive in the communities and support structures around them. All, however, have a shared objective: to find a place where they are free to move and stim, uninhibited by the tests and
restrictions of normative society. This secret place is the Stimming Pool…”.

“Stimming” or self-stimulating behavior are repetitive actions or motions that people use to help regulate their emotions or cope with feelings.

The movie features a cast of autistic actors and non-actors, including neurodivergent performance artist Dre Spisto. Members of the Neurocultures Collective also appear, mostly behind the scenes discussing creative decisions. The Stimming Pool was shot on Super 16mm by Aftersun cinematographer Greg Oke.

The film had its world premiere at CPH:DOX 2024 in Copenhagen and was recently screened at the BFI London Film Festival. And just the other week, it became one of 13 feature films on the longlist for this year’s Raindance Maverick Award at the British Independent Film Awards, or BIFAs. The honor is for “creative, cash-conscious, and risk-taking filmmakers.”

U.K. production and distribution company Dartmouth Films is planning a theatrical release for the spring of 2025.

The co-creators behind The Stimming Pool are the Neurocultures Collective, made up of Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, and Lucy Walker, who collaborated on the project with artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood, who worked as co-director and co-producer, as well as producer Chloe White of Whalebone Films.

The project began with a grant from the health charity Wellcome Trust for Autism Through Cinema, a research project at Queen Mary University London that looked at “how cinema has created descriptions of autism and affected our understanding of neurodiversity.” The research project was structured around two core activities: film archeology, led by Professor Janet Harbord, and film practice, led by filmmaker and Professor of Film Practice Eastwood. As part of the grant, Eastwood ran a series of workshops that acted as building blocks for the formation of the collective that was formed in late 2020. They then collaborated on the feature-length hybrid film The Stimming Pool, plus a multi-screen gallery installation called “Stim Cinema.”

Despite a busy London Film Festival schedule and big crowds, several members of the Collective and Eastwood took time to meet with THR in a somewhat quiet corner of London’s Southbank Centre to discuss the film and their creative experience.

Their key focus was on creating something that looks and feels different and appeals to them without feeling the need to educate viewers.

“I suppose we’re not necessarily teaching the audience about autism,” Chown-Ahern shared with THR. “We are all autistic, and we all have different experiences being autistic but also different experiences of working and enjoying film. So, this film doesn’t say, ‘here is what it’s like to be autistic,’ but we’ve just made a film, and some of the aspects of autism just are there because that’s what it’s like on an everyday basis for us.”

Concluded the creative: “So to the audience, the best way I can say it is, ‘don’t have any expectations for what you’re going to see, because it is quite a different film.’ And it is a film that does push barriers and boundaries, probably because it’s not presenting a linear narrative. But it’s also not representing what we normally see or perceive to be film.”

Bradburn echoed that sentiment. “I hope people can leave with the idea that there is a possibility for different ways of making films and different narratives,” she told THR. “I think especially documentary historically is quite rigid. The film was in the Create strand of the London Film Festival, and I think that really speaks to the fact that the film is about the creative process. It’s about creating and about collaborating.”

She concluded: “I hope that people can take away that their creative process doesn’t have to be a specific way. It doesn’t have to be neurotypical. It doesn’t have to conform to this way or this language. There are different possibilities.”

Eastwood recalled a moment during the creative process for the film that spoke volumes about that. ‘We had an assembled cut that wasn’t locked but we had a pretty good shape for the film,” he told THR. “We did a test screening, and some people who don’t identify as neurodivergent or autistic said, ‘You need more signposting. What about explanatory text on the screen? You can’t ask the audience to trust this much in terms of flow and pattern.’ And it was so striking that everybody from the Collective just said: ‘No, we stick to our convictions.’ It’s not about handholding. It’s about opening up to explore the frame, to be curious, to drift, and to sort of sway.”

He added that The Stimming Pool is not about solving a riddle. “That is the thing a lot of films do,” Eastwood emphasized. “They withhold information, get you curious, and then explain everything at the end.”

When this writer shared that he enjoyed points in the film when he struggled to make sense of certain things and that he even went back to rewatch one scene the following day, Chown-Ahern smiled. “It’s definitely a film that I think needs to be seen more than once, just because there is so much stuff packed in, but also it is that beautiful discovery that you have throughout the film when you do watch different things and you notice things that you may not have noticed on first watch,” she said. “So the fact that you went back and rewatched this scene makes me really happy because this is what we want in a way. We want people to return, we want people to want to come back to revisit it, be it purely out of curiosity or out of intrigue.”

Without spoiling the ending, the film finishes with a particularly memorable scene. The creative team shared that throughout the development process, it had various conversations about how to best wrap up the film. The Collective and Eastwood agreed that they didn’t want a negative ending but something that several of the creatives described as “a celebration” and “a release.” Bradburn calls it “a satisfying, natural endpoint.”

The Stimming Pool is a reference to an abandoned swimming pool that plays a key role in the movie. But where did the idea for that come from? This is where the two other members of the Collective who were not present at the meeting with THR come in. Walker came up with a character described as a dog spirit animal. The Collective wanted all characters to come together at the end in one location. Brown, meanwhile, was interested in testing of people as a concept and also has an interest in abandoned spaces. “He’s talked about re-wilding civic spaces with like autistic gesture, autistic behavior,” Eastwood told THR. “So he came up with the idea of shooting in an empty swimming pool, and then he came up with the concept of a stimming pool, and then that just became one of the signature events.”

Another memorable part of the film is a gory zombie animation sequence courtesy of Elliott-Knowles. “I wanted to show something of my love of the genres of horror and sci-fi, and I thought why not?” the creative tells THR when asked how he came up with the idea. “So I did a storyboard. I’m doing storyboards in comic book style of alternative history at home. It’s all the historical events of the world where women can become warriors and noone judges against sex or gender. But they still judge against race and religion. So I decided to make a little storyboard of the American Civil War with a female Yankee soldier [fighting] Confederate zombies in the Louisiana swamp areas.”

Could the film and broader world see more from the Collective in the future? “I don’t want to put any impression on anybody. There are conversations to be had,” Bradburn offered. “I think all of us throughout the process have seen stuff and [also do] create other things outside of the film and we want to work more. Myself and Sam just finished working on another film project, so we’ve got a good collaboration going on between us.”

She added: “Lucy had a different character that didn’t quite make it into the film and that I had worked on with her closely. I think Lucy in particular and I have a connection in that sense, and Robin as well with this alternative history project which is really cool and amazing. So, we’ve all talked about wanting to really get involved in all these projects together.”

Eastwood is proud that The Stimming Pool presents a different approach to filmmaking. “People think that films are just about character arcs and story structures,” he told THR. “This film is really saying: what about films that just sway and rock and drift and are about patterns and the joy of things that repeat? I think everybody has that joy, and audiences don’t have to be spoon-fed structures.”

Before the meeting wrapped up, he had one more thing to emphasize. “The way the film was made, which is as special to us as the film, was to have a fully accessible and inclusive shoot,” Eastwood highlighted. “We had quiet spaces, we had advisors, advocates, we had an almost entirely autistic cast and a high proportion of the crew also identified as neurodivergent. We had disability riders, so people could specify their needs. That’s something that we really feel proud of. And it’s co-owned. We all had sign-off on the edit. It’s really a co-created project, and that’s something that we are really keen to share.”