The Stimming Pool screened at BFI London Film Festival and is awaiting a UK-wide release date.
For those who are neurodiverse, the term ‘stimming’ refers to ‘repetitive body movements or repetitive movement of objects.’ Traditionally, ‘stimming’ has been linked to neurodiverse conditions like autism, where autistic people use stimming like twirling hair or clicking a pen in their hand as a coping mechanism in helping them make sense of the world. Personally, as someone on the autistic spectrum, I tend to stim through having a pen in my hand if I’m doing some form of public speaking.
That said, this context serves as the foundation for a unique collaboration between the Neurocultures collective – a group of neurodiverse artists consisting of artists Georgia Kumari Bradburn, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Benjamin Brown, Sam Ahern and Lucy Walker – and artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood. The result is The Stimming Pool, an experimental feature film that teeters as a hybrid between documentary and fictional narrative. Over the course of its brief 67-minute runtime, the collective and Winwood explore our everyday surroundings, from the banality of a clinic waiting room to the noisy camaraderie of a pub, through a neurodiverse perspective that constantly drifts from one idea to another in a manner that’s less jarring and more seamless in style.
To demonstrate this point, the film opens with Robin Elliott-Knowles, host of the real-life B-movie fan club, introducing a sold-out audience at the Hastings Electric Palace Theatre to a screening of a lost zombie flick, warning them of the content they’re about to witness. It then cuts to a medical clinic waiting room where Sam Chow Ahern is filling out a cognitive test questionnaire, reading the questions aloud to herself to aid her thought process. At the same time, Gregory Oke’s gorgeous Super 16mm cinematography (who did exceptional work on Aftersun) pans around the rest of the waiting room, taking in a man reading a book whilst stimming their legs and a young girl and her mother reading a picture book about a border collie called Chess.
Within these scenes, it’s noticeable how The Stimming Pool is less interested in conventional documentary techniques like a voiceover narrator guiding us along and keener on engaging the viewer visually in a way that’s straight out of their comfort zone. As Sam takes an eye-tracking test designed to understand what attracts her attention through watching various vignettes of everyday life on a computer screen, the film seamlessly segues into one of these vignettes from the calming silence of a clinic to the abrasive hustle and bustle of a busy town centre. Simultaneously, numerous red dots blink onscreen to replicate Sam’s eye-tracking test results as she absorbs each video thoroughly. Although this conveys how autistic people are sensitively aware of their surroundings while also aligning the viewer with the autistic experience, this brief insight is unashamedly experimental, whilst being accessible for the viewer to understand.
Compared to a recent documentary, The Reason I Jump (2020) – a beautiful adaptation of Naoki Higashida’s novel of the same name – that equally aims to capture the autistic experience, The Stimming Pool has the advantage of being co-directed by a group of neurodiverse people instead of a neurotypical director like Jerry Rothwell. This gives the film a sense of authority that has been lacking in recent films and TV about autism, from The A Word to Life, Animated. Crucially, it’s a film bursting with creativity as it takes inspiration from Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s concept of social (sur)realism, a method of bringing observational documentary into contact with fantastical, constructed elements.
In Weerasethakul’s film Mysterious Object at Noon, he travels across Thailand interviewing ordinary people and asking them to add their own words to a story, which is acted out onscreen. A similar notion is deployed in The Stimming Pool as Chess from the picture book comes to life as an enigmatic dog-human spirit dressed as a superhero, borne from the mind of collective member Lucy Walker (her face is unseen). It’s a brilliantly creative but also powerful character as Chess reappears in abandoned spaces normally teeming with life that are often intimidating for autistic people, but are now calm, inviting environments where much-needed respite can take place.
And that’s the most important aspect when discussing The Stimming Pool. It invites us to think about these environments and how some people mask their autism and feel isolated within them, while others thrive thanks to supportive communities that are inclusive and understanding of their condition. It’s a beautiful film, compassionately shot and ripe for rewatches as recurring visual motifs like Robin’s animated gore fest and Chess are given more context as the film unfolds. Even if the experimental elements are less refined than the rest of the film, this is daring, visceral, artful filmmaking made by neurodiverse people with a singular perspective about their own experiences. Personally, I think that is rare and wonderful and should be celebrated.
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