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Do you know how many autistic people there are in the UK? The answer is an estimated 700,000. Yet until now, there has never been a single feature-length film directed by autistic people. Or at least not one that has secured a theatrical release in the UK and slots at festivals worldwide.
The film is The Stimming Pool, an experimental feature shot over just 12 days that puts on screen the interests, passions and perspectives of its five young autistic creators. They worked alongside Steven Eastwood, professor of film practice at London’s Queen Mary University, funded initially by the Wellcome Trust. “We asked why autistic people are always required to explain or illustrate their experience,” says Eastwood. “What about just having neurodivergent authors behind the cameras, doing the creativity?”
Such an approach is in contrast to the Chris Packham-presented BBC two-parter Inside Our Autistic Minds from 2023, for which autistic people worked with TV producers to make short films that aimed to show their families how autism affected them. This wasn’t what Georgia Kumari Bradburn, one of the directors of The Stimming Pool, wanted to do: “It was never about us having a duty to explain who we are or what we are doing to other people. This is just the way we exist. It’s a different way of existing.”
Despite its multiple directors, The Stimming Pool is not an anthology film with distinct chapters, but an intricate collaboration. Characters recur and narratives bleed into one another. We see the directors sitting around a table discussing how to weave their themes together. No one is identified directly and there are no captions or commentary. The audience is left to make its own interpretations.
The Stimming Pool challenges some of the familiar tropes of documentaries and dramas about autism. One of its directors is Sam Chown Ahern, who featured in the 2018 Channel 4 documentary Are You Autistic? Ahern is filmed in a waiting room. She spots a little girl, also waiting, and echoes her repetitive hand movements – the kind that autistic people call “stims”, or self-stimulatory behaviour. Ahern muses on the ambiguities of the language used in a questionnaire designed to diagnose autism, then we see her take part in eye-tracking research intended to analyse how autistic people perceive facial expressions.
The red dots and lines from the researcher’s screen leak into sequences that follow another autistic character, clearly exhausted by navigating the sensory overload and social demands of the world. Benjamin Brown, a lover of derelict buildings and dystopian movies, contributed surreal sequences shot in an abandoned factory in which white-coated scientists use arcane devices to measure human subjects. In a satirical twist, these subjects start to mock the scientists through mime.
Robin Elliott-Knowles, meanwhile, brings his passion for history, schlock horror and anime to the mix. We meet him welcoming a friendly audience to his local community cinema in Hastings, introducing an apparently lost video nasty. It turns out to be scenes from an animated drama he has directed about a female Confederate-era soldier with a cat’s face fighting zombies in a swamp – all based on his own artwork.
Speaking over coffee at the BFI Southbank in London, alongside his fellow directors, Elliott-Knowles is delighted to recall the shoot: “I directed the actress and the very nice guy who played the zombie. Interestingly, I always remembered to say ‘Action’ but never remembered to say ‘Cut’! To guide their movements, I suggested they imagine a cork being pulled out of a bottle – the moment it is in and the moment after. I think it worked. They were great actors.”
Recurring throughout the film is the Shapeshifter, a character created by another director, Georgia Bradburn. Played by Dre Spisto, a neurodivergent, non-binary performance artist, the Shapeshifter navigates busy streets, open-plan offices, crowded pubs and toilets while wearing noise-cancelling headphones. Once home and alone, Spisto performs what looks like an elaborately choreographed sequence of body movements across the floor and furniture, muttering repeated phrases.
“The original idea for the Shapeshifter,” says Bradburn, “was someone who is constantly transforming in their body through stimming. They are transitioning from a public space to a private space – and when they get there, they can lift the burden of ‘masking’. They can just move in whatever way they want. That’s something I used to do.”
It all adds up to a dense, elliptical film that rewards repeated viewing. Some reactions have been strong. “A couple of weeks ago,” says Chown Ahern, “we had a screening and a young woman came in and said, ‘I’m autistic and I’ve travelled here on the tube and I was already overwhelmed.’ It’s supposed to be intense in certain ways. That is the purpose of it – which is probably why it requires a second viewing.”
Although neurotypical myself, I have a profoundly autistic brother and take a keen interest in the condition’s portrayal. So I felt it was important to show The Stimming Pool to autistic people for their perspective. One, a friend who didn’t want to be named, complained bluntly: “It was pretentious wank with an autism flavour. Not my thing at all. I don’t really know what they were trying to do or convey. And I don’t like stuff where I need someone to explain the meaning to me. The art should do that.”
But Rosie King, another friend, was moved to tears. “Absolutely beautiful,” said King, whose Ted Talk on her experience of autism has had 3.2m views. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film truly capture what it’s like to be autistic like this before – the good and bad parts. My favourites were the stimming sequences though, especially the last one in the pool with the spinning camera. They felt almost like interpretive dance. It showed a real beauty in stimming that I’ve never seen in film before. I loved all the young people involved and the focus on their art. So often autism narratives wholly surround the condition’s limitations with only a passing glance at autistic joy. Seeing this group come together and create beautiful things really touched me.”
Eastwood adds: “One thing we chatted about was this expectation with a film that you’ve got to make sense of it and solve the mystery. I think everyone in the group has a love of the avant garde: experimental films, art films.”
But the fact that the group could discuss sophisticated genre films in their meetings does flag up the absence of non-verbal or minimally verbal autistic people in the process. Figures suggest that one in three autistic people also has a learning disability, while 25-30% are minimally or non-verbal. Apart from a brief scene filmed at the Project Artworks studios in Hastings, where we see the non-verbal artist Heidi Nice, who has multiple disabilities, being helped to fingerpaint, The Stimming Pool only features autistic people who are adept at language and autonomous.
Eastwood is aware that the film doesn’t include the significant proportion of the autism community who have more complex needs. “When this project first ran,” he says, “it was designed to include a range, including non-verbal people. The pandemic killed that because, for the best part of a year, we could only meet remotely. We planned to develop it as a London and Hastings project and do a lot of studio workshopping at Project Artworks, but that all went out the window. However, I don’t think this project should have to represent all the experiences of autism. But we recognise that everyone in the film, apart from Heidi, is verbal.”
Bradburn sees the film as simply a starting point. “You cannot generalise autism for everyone,” he says. “It would be impossible to make a film that encapsulates the entire experience, because it is so varied.” Eastwood echoes these points: “We’re asking why films about autism have to carry the responsibility of answering all those questions. This is not a film about autism – it’s a film about autistic co-creation.”
