The Stimming Pool

Immerse yourself in a wildly imaginative, proudly neurodivergent world informed by autistic perspectives and perception.

A young man who runs a B-movie fan club introduces a screening of an animated zombie horror movie. A woman in a medical office fills out questionnaires and submits to an eye-tracking test. An office worker dons blue earphones to mask out the chaos at work, the gym and the pub – but, at home, she’s free to take pleasure in her own space. And an enigmatic but nonetheless benevolent dog-spirit watches over all disabled people. How are their experiences connected?

To craft this groundbreaking work, artist and filmmaker Steven Eastwood joined forces with Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles and Lucy Walker – a group of autistic directors known as the Neurocultures Collective. Inspired by Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s concept of social surrealism, their experimental hybrid film also borrows the quirky repeated motifs of Jacques Tati’s Playtime and the baton-passing structure of Richard Linklater’s Slacker (MIFF 1992), blurring the observational and the fantastical. In free-flowing imagery gorgeously shot on Super 16mm by cinematographer Gregory Oke (Aftersun, MIFF 2022), these autistic actors and non-actors take the cinematic plunge and revel in their own sensory subjectivities.

“Curious and complex … An incredibly powerful way to convey the joy of being who you are.” – Ekko