The Stimming Pool - My Introduction @ HOME, 3rd April 2025

I was delighted to be asked to give an introduction to the remarkable new film The Stimming Pool at HOME last week. This is what I had to say:

My characteristic hand gesture when speaking in front of an audience...

"Welcome everybody to this special screening of The Stimming Pool. My name is Dr David Hartley and I’m here to do a brief introduction to the film today. I’m only going to talk for around ten minutes, just to place the film into a bit of context, and to offer some of my own personal reflections and thoughts about this remarkable and unique piece of filmmaking.

I know quite a bit about how this film was conceived and made, because I know many of the filmmakers personally. A few years ago, I was studying for my PhD here in Manchester where I was analysing the representation of autism in science fiction film and literature, and just as I was finishing my studies, I connected up with a project called Autism Through Cinema, which was taking place at Queen Mary, University of London. This brilliant project was run by Professor Janet Harbord and Dr Steven Eastwood and it aimed to explore how autism and the autistic viewpoint can be used to interrogate and redefine cinema in all its guises – from creation, to interpretation, via analysis and distribution. The project had a co-creation model, which meant that Janet and Steven actively recruited autistic people who were interested in film making, film criticism, film screenings and film fandom, and brought them together for a series of creative workshops and discussion. From those workshops and discussion, a group of autistic filmmakers formed and they began to call themselves the Neurocultures Collective. They are Georgia Bradburn, Sam Chown-Ahern, Robin Knowles, Lucy Walker, and Benjamin Brown, and The Stimming Pool is their first film, which was made in collaboration with Steven Eastwood.

Interestingly, there’s a scene in the second half of this film where you see all six of these directors sitting around a table discussing the film, talking about what they’re title they’re going to use, what scenes they want to include, and what direction they want to take the film. And if you look closely in this scene you might see what’s displayed on their laptop screens; you catch glimpses of spirals and lines and branches and pictures and text. This is the massive digital moodboard that they all worked on as they discussed ideas for this film, and it gives you a brief visual insight into the shape and tone of the film that you are watching. Because, fair warning; this is a strange film. It is dreamlike, it meanders, it drifts, and it drifts in and out of different genres. At times it feels like a documentary, but then it becomes something different; an adventure? A horror film? A drama? It’s difficult to pin down a genre, and that’s a key part of the magic and mystique of The Stimming Pool, and also a key part of what this creative team are trying to say about the relationship between autism and film as an art form.

A sell-out screening for The Stimming Pool

The film resists telling a coherent and linear story. Now, you might find a story in there; I think this is one of those films where every person watching it is going to have a different experience – a divergent experience – from the person sitting next to you. And that’s OK, that kind of feels like the point. The film also resists creating so-called conventional characters. There is one purely fictional character in there; the so-called ‘shapeshifter’, who is the person with the dark hair and the blue outfit, who moves and shifts and appears across multiple scenes, sometimes the main feature, sometimes a little lost in the background. They are in a sense our protagonist, but what exactly is it they are doing? Where exactly are they going, and what are they looking for? Perhaps those are the wrong questions to ask – perhaps they are deliberately going nowhere, not looking for anything in particular, but one thing is for sure; they are moving closer and closer to the stimming pool itself, whatever that may be.

And one other key thing that this film resists is the impulse to teach an audience about autism. I’ve had conversations with some of the filmmakers who said that the collective agreed that they’d had enough of seeing films, particularly documentaries, that are trying to summarise autism, or trying to explain concepts like neurodiversity and neurotypicality and the autistic spectrum, etc. There’s a sense, I think, that autism is too massive and complicated a phenomenon to explain or summarise neatly. Instead, the Neurocultures Collective decided to avoid all of that and instead plunge you into a surreal, perhaps at times disturbing, sensory landscape of divergent seeing, thinking, and apprehending, in a world that gestures towards themes such as control, isolation, masking, and the act of testing and being tested.

The result of that is a film in which the camera itself feels autistic. You’ll notice that the camera is often on the move – drifting, or spinning, or spiralling, or whirling in time with the figures on screen, and then at other times it just sits very still and looks. Not only that, it invites you to look, and to become aware of the act of looking. I won’t spoil how exactly it does that because it’s a fun and unusual effect, but the point is that The Stimming Pool challenges you to rethink how you typically use your senses; what is it that you notice? Where do you look, what do you hear, how do you move your body, how do you occupy space? At the same time, it asks you to consider how other people, whose minds may be divergent to your own, experience these same sensory inputs.

Let me just take you back briefly to the ATC project. One of the main things that I got involved with was the Autism Through Cinema podcast, which you can still find on Spotify and Apple and wherever you get your podcasts. I helped to run and co-host this podcast over a period of three years, and we created fifty episodes, each of which focuses on a different individual film, analysed from an autistic perspective. We looked at films like Brazil and ET, but also Blade Runner, Punch-Drunk Love, Moonrise Kingdom, Eraserhead, Cars, City Lights, Amelie, Under the Skin, Kiki’s Delivery Service and many others. Georgia Bradburn, who is one of the directors of this film, was one of the other co-hosts on the podcast. Her interpretations of these films, and the contributions of the other co-hosts Alex, Lillian, and Ethan, and the many autistic special guests we featured, have fundmentally changed the way I look at cinema. Regardless of whatever film I’m watching I now think of the camera as an autistic eye; roving, focusing, with a special obsession over the subject it is capturing. And I’m always on the look out for autistic characters, especially those who weren’t created with autism in mind. I have a recent example;Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy ,the latest in the series. Part way through the film I thought to myself; oh wow, is Bridget autistic? The way she speaks, her inner monologue, her clumsiness, her social faux pas, her chaotic and creative individualism, her warmth and spirit. Of course, I don’t think she was created in that way, but how fascinating would it be if the next Bridget Jones film was Bridget Jones: The Autism Diagnosis? Maybe that’s a bad idea, they’d only get it wrong. But the point is this: by the end of the podcast my outlook on cinema had fundamentally changed. Indeed, I'd concluded that of all the artistic mediums, cinema is perhaps the most autistic.

That brings us back to the Stimming Pool. How do we interpret this film? And should we even try? Well, I’d like to offer an approach. If you are autistic, which I imagine many of you in this room are, this film has been made with you in mind. This is not a film which exists to teach non-autistic people about autism, this is a film where the expression and experience of autism is deeply embedded in the construction. It may not fully chime with your version of autism but it should capture something of the essence of your experience of the world. If you are not autistic, you will likely know someone who is. I invite you, in this safe and fantastical space, to let this film bring you momentarily closer to their way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and sensing. Just for this next hour, try to resist your neurotypical thought processes. Try to resist looking for a realistic story or authentic characters or the proper way of making films. Allow The Stimming Pool to show you something new, for once.

For me, I always think of my sister, Jenny. I like to think that I glimpse her, right at the end, when we reach the stimming pool itself, dancing and flicking and humming in the shallow end. I like to think that with a film like this, I’m getting just a little closer to experiencing what goes on in her wonderful brain.

Enjoy the film.

What a delight to see this film do so well. Huge congrats to The Neurocultures Collective & Steven Eastwood