Here is an engaging docufictional experiment, an investigation into autism co-created by a group of young artists on the spectrum called the Neurocultures Collective. The resulting film is ingenious, funny, intellectually curious – and pregnant with ideas. It is all about how autism shapes creativity and makes sense of the self, and it gives a new kind of access to the mysterious and the uncanny.
One of the group is shown hosting a B-movie cult film club and also drawing a storyboard for his planned shlock-horror animation about zombies in the American civil war, a fragment of which we will see later. Another is apparently in a doctor’s waiting room filling out a questionnaire designed to assess her possible autism, while a little girl opposite is reading a story about a border collie called Chess. (Another member of the group will later act out the part of Chess.) Having finished the questionnaire, she is asked by the doctor to watch videos while he tracks her eye movements; we then watch the same videos ourselves while onscreen graphics – red dots and lines – make jagged shapes across the action, in places where we maybe weren’t looking. Other participants demonstrate their own choreography of ritualistic and repetitive movements: a part of intuitive role-play.
The Neurocultures Collective group (Sam Chown Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker) are convened by artist and film-maker Steven Eastwood, and their discussions about their creative projects are configured as a quasi-fictional event, interspersed by the creations themselves. The collective’s members finally come together in an empty swimming pool, which becomes their own “stimming pool”, symbolising their collective innovation. It’s an intriguing and atmospheric piece of work, and I’d like to see the individual film ideas expanded at feature length.
• The Stimming Pool is in UK cinemas from 28 March.
