The Stimming Pool. 2024. UK. Directed by The Neurocultures Collective, Steven Eastwood. Members of The Neurocultures Collective: Benjamin Brown, Georgia Bradburn, Sam Chown-Ahern, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker. New York premiere. 70 min.
What, really, is magic realism? What is “an autistic camera”? In their chimerical film—a mash up of various movie genres that takes on a logic of its own—the Neurocultures Collective (Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, and Lucy Walker), in collaboration with the artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood, have worked with a cast of autistic actors and non-actors and the cinematographer Greg Oke (Aftersun) to create a shimmering composite portrait of how they perceive and experience the world. “The curiosity of this [autistic] camera,” they explain, “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. Sometimes the camera wanders off without any guide, finding an ancient woodland, an abandoned testing center, even a fragment from an animated zombie film set in the American Civil War….”