29/07/2024 - The hybrid film made by the UK's Neurocultures Collective and director Steven Eastwood offers a refreshing and poignant representation of a different view of the world

The concept of co-creation in cinema has in recent years gained visibility, with films made by various collectives becoming a festival staple, especially in the documentary field. The latest such effort, The Stimming Pool, made by the UK’s Neurocultures Collective which brings together five neurodivergent artists - Sam Chown Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles and Lucy Walker – and filmmaker Steven Eastwood, is also one of its most interesting and inspiring examples. Following its world premiere at CPH:DOX, the film recently shared the Best Film Award at IceDocs with Kumjana Novakova’s Silence of Reason [+see also:
film review
film profile]. 

The nominal concept of the film is to show the world from an autistic point of view (press notes mention an "autistic camera"), but it feels like a hybrid of documentary and fiction, an associative combination of ideas and characters thought up by the collective. Elliot-Knowes is a B-movie buff and wants to make a gory, animated horror film about a Union soldier who faces zombies in the Civil War. The opening scene, which precedes our introduction to the young man, shows us a bog which could easily be located in Louisiana swamplands, and has a deeply oneiric quality – a key aspect of the film, much in the vein of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s approach of combining the documentary with the fantastic. The images filmed on celluloid by Greg Oke (Aftersun [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]) easily call back to the Thai master’s aesthetics, the camera holding the shot of gnarly roots immersed in muddy water for a couple of seconds before gliding between the trees close to the ground, to the sound of an echoing orchestral score led by woodwinds – a segment that will keep coming back and expanding throughout the film.   

Ahern is in a waiting room, reading the questions of a cognitive test out loud as she answers them. A mother and a child sitting across from her are leafing through a children’s book featuring Chess the Border Collie, a character we later learn was invented by Walker. The dog’s hearing abilities are linked with autistic people’s extreme sensitivity to sounds. Ahern then takes an eye-tracking test, watching an apparently documentary clip filmed on the street. The person who is testing her follows her eyes via computer-generated red dots, which will keep coming back in various shots. The street scene turns out to be part of the film: it features An(dre)a Spisto, a queer, neurodiverse Venezuelan performance artist, who here plays an office worker who tries to hide their autism. 

These various aspects fuse together, with Walker wearing a border collie costume and Spisto becoming the animated Union soldier, who also turns into a dog. There is an actual border collie, too, apparently belonging to Spisto's character. At one point, all the co-creators are in an empty swimming pool, where they are free to stim –which means to go through the repetitive, self-stimulating actions that neurodivergent people often engage in– which plays out like a dizzying silent party, as the camera repeatedly makes 360-degree vertical turns. 

This description accounts for just a few of the film's loosely connected threads, which fully rely on associations and are unified to a certain degree by the score and the editing. But the film clearly tells us that it isn't directly interested in presenting a narrative. Instead, it is an experience in which our instinct to find the "story" is constantly challenged. However, the result is never frustrating thanks to the freshness of the viewing experience which provides a heartfelt, poignant representation of a different view of the world. 

The Stimming Pool is a production of the UK's Whalebone Films in association with Paradogs Films.