The Stimming Pool is a feature-length documentary – directed by filmmaker Steven Eastwood and the Neurocultures Collective – where we see five neurodiverse artists create a singular visual project that offers a fascinating glimpse into their singular perspective on the human experience. The film will have its UK premiere at the BFI Film Festival in London this October.
Ahead of the premiere, we spoke to filmmaker Steven Eastwood and one of the Neurocultures Collective members, Georgia Bradburn, about the film, how they got involved in this project and their neurodiverse method of filmmaking.
Steven Eastwood is an artist-filmmaker. His work is often concerned with ethics, belief, mental health and physical disability. He has published widely and is Professor of Film Practice at Queen Mary University London, where he is Head of Film Practice.
His current projects are concerned with Neurodiversity (Autism through Cinema, funded by Wellcome Trust) and co-creation methodologies.
Speaking about his connections with neurodiversity, Steven said: “I don’t identify as neurodiverse, but I also don’t identify as neurotypical. I really like Donna Williams, an autistic scholar, who has a term ‘From Autist: Artist’, which I really like. And also this term, the ‘Gadoodleborger‘, which is somehow like an in-between neither typical nor non-typical person. So I’m not an autistic individual, but I really enjoyed the commonality of language we had on the project, sharing our ideas as artists.”
Georgia Bradburn is a filmmaker, writer and visual artist from London who identifies as autistic. She is a graduate of Queen Mary University of London, where she studied Film, including a year at the University of Texas at Austin in the Radio-Television-Film school.
She is a frequent host on the Autism Through Cinema Podcast and a member of the UK-based art collective Neurocultures. Her written work on autism and film has led her to various opportunities, such as introducing a screening of Mulholland Drive at the Barbican in 2021, presenting at the Autism Through Cinema conference in 2023, and programming relaxed screenings for the British Film Institute in 2023.
Sharing how she got involved in The Stimming Pool project, Georgia said: “I was at Queen Mary University and that’s how I came to be part of the collective and part of the Autism Through Cinema Project, which is a research project at Queen Mary, which is how this film came to happen.
“I was doing my undergraduate degree and essentially, through that, I got to work on this film as part of the collective, which has been really great because it’s given me the confidence to continue working on my own filmmaking and my own work. I’m still at the start of my career, essentially.”
The creation of the Neurocultures Collective
The Neurocultures Project focused on how autism can transform established cinematic norms and create progressive images.
Georgia explained how she was introduced to the Collective: “I came into the Collective from Queen Mary, but it started from the research project and they put this gang together of neurodivergent artists. So we were all co-directors on the film the Collective and Steven, and that was in 2020.
“We’re a group of autistic artists from interdisciplinary backgrounds, which I think was an important part of this. We’re not just filmmakers. We bring lots of different art processes to the film, which makes it unique.
Steven continued: “The Stimming Pool grew out of this bigger project, which is called Autism Through Cinema and there is another short film called Autism Plays Itself that’s come out of that project, which we were very fortunate to get Welcome Trust funding from.
“The project really asked the question, “How does popular culture film, documentary and fiction assume a neurotypicality, a sort of neuronormativity and how can being more inclusive of autistic creativity and perspectives challenge that?’.
“We really wanted to change the way that we make films. So we ran lots of workshops, which invited autistic participants and that led to the creation of the Collective.
“So, with my colleague Janet Harwood, I spearheaded that bigger project. I’m an artist filmmaker myself, so I collaborated as a director with the Neurocultures Collective, which along with Georgia, there is Robin Elliott-Knowles, Sam Chown Ahern, Benjamin Brown and Lucy Walker.”
The making of The Stimming Pool
Georgia went on to tell us more about the film The Stimming Pool: “It’s like a hybrid documentary fiction. It doesn’t really fit into any genre or kind of classification of film. It’s a collection of us as artists, our individual ideas about how we express our autism artistically.
“It becomes a sprawling flowing non-narrative. There’s lots of different nesting stories and characters that flow together illogically, but it forms this liberated flow, which links in with the idea of stimming in the film and the idea of freedom and the lack of restraint in expression and movement that the autism movement is trying to talk more about.
“It’s very difficult to give it a plot or a narrative. It is essentially just a collection of different ideas put together in a structure that makes sense for an artistic, creative process.”
With the filming process, Georgia continued: “Well, I think one of the main aims of the project was not just to create this film with the themes that it has, but also to try to create a method of filmmaking that rejects the neurotypical rules of how you make a film that often excludes disabled people and autistic people.
“One of those things was the collaborative method of not just working on a script and, sticking by that, it was more about this playful, collaborative creative process.
“During the actual shooting of the film, there were all sorts of things in place to make it as accessible as possible. So we had advocates on set for the Collectives and call sheets were accessible. It would have people’s faces and names and all the locations, everything was very clearly marked.
“So there was no uncertainty and we were allowed to have breaks. Everything was not rushed in a way that’s quite stressful in a lot of film sets.
“It all felt very equal. We had equal sign-off on the edit and we all had equal opportunities directing and on the colour grade and all post-production. We all had an equal input and in approving of everything. So the process of filming felt quite radical in that it challenged the normal ways of doing this that often.
“I think for me, as someone who has been doing film for a bit and really struggling with how things are set up, it felt like it was radical because it was making room for people that don’t fit into these structures. So I’m hoping that by talking about this and sharing the film, we can open up a dialogue about how films are made and how we can make it not just more accessible but more playful and making room for different ways of creation and different ways of being.”
Steven added: “We had almost an entirely autistic cast and there were over 100 cast members if you count the extras. We had a number of people in the crew who identified as autistic or neurodivergent, including our first AD (assistant director), who was really fantastic to act as that conduit role.
“I think we wanted to take some of the pain and brutality out of the filmmaking process because there’s a lot. It is assumed that films have to be really intense, high-pressure environments, and we wanted to challenge that.”
Georgia then explained how they came up with the film title The Stimming Pool: “That I think I keep talking about play and that title really came up out of us just doing wordplay because we talk a lot about these conventional spaces and spaces that have a purpose in society, like a swimming pool or a supermarket or a gym. You go to these places for a specific purpose.
“We also talked a lot about rewilding and this film is a way for us to bring stimming back into the gestures that we see every day and something that’s not stigmatised and rewilding autistic people back into the world.
“So in part of that, we were talking about swimming pools and the idea of swimming being sort of like a neurotypically sanctioned stimming because it’s this repetitive movement, but it’s just so normal because that’s what people do.
“Then someone said, ‘Well, what if it was a stimming pool?’ and we just had this idea in our heads when we said that of just an empty swimming pool with people just stimming in it. So now it’s a stimming pool and we’ve rewild with neuro-queered that space.
“So when we were discussing later on the title for the film, that phrase just kept coming back to us because a lot of the film is in this stimming pool. This space that people come and find as a place to stim, a dedicated space to stim.”
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The Stimming Pool film festival run
The Stimming Pool will premiere at the BFI Film Festival on Friday 11th October and there will also be accessible screenings of the film throughout the festival.
Steven explained a bit more about their other film festival appearances: “We are on the crest of our international festivals run. BFI is a UK premier that’s playing at a whole bunch of other festivals in the UK. After BFI, it goes to Folkestone, Cambridge and Leeds.
“The World Premier was CPH Docs in Copenhagen in March. It’s also playing at other international film festivals, including Sao Paulo, Korea, Hungary, Italy and Cork. It’s playing two or three times a month around the world at the moment.”
Steven then shared what they plan to do with the film following the festival run: “We’ve partnered with a distributor called Dartmouth, and we’ve got an audience development award actually. So, we are releasing the film as a limited theatrical release in March and April next year. I think it’s going to be around 50 or 60 UK screenings and we want to have as many of the co-creators attend as possible.
“We’re also keen to use those public screenings to learn about how the film can be impactful, so how can we share the process and method for how we made it? Then I think hopefully it will get some streaming. It would be great to put it on some of those platforms.”
The Stim Cinema art exhibition
The Neurocultures Collective is also running an art exhibition called Stim Cinema as a part of LFF Expanded (a separate strand of the festival that explored new dimensions in storytelling – aside from films and documentaries.
Georgia told us more about the exhibition: “With Stim Cinema, we shot at the same time as The Stimming Pool. It’s the same sort of story and the same sort of themes.
“It’s a three-screen installation that focuses mainly on the origin of the moving image and the idea of repeating frames and the delight in the repetition and how within the origin of the moving image is a delight in stimming, which has been lost. I feel like this film is rediscovering why there is so much joy in repetition and bringing stimming onto the screen and making a film that stims in its own way. So, we have a lot of repeating GIFs throughout the film.
“We also bring the eye tracking element into it, which is something that’s in The Stimming Pool, Eye tracking is often used diagnostically to work out what the focus of an image is or where people will look. It’s used in marketing as well.
“But we were trying to flip that on its head a bit and explore what the focus of an image is and how there can be alternative sources of fascination within an image like something in the background, like a tree moving softly – that can be prioritised over a person may be in the same frame.
“And where the autistic eye becomes fascinated with things that aren’t necessarily the main thing in the image, but the background and the fascinating details. And the eye-tracking dot itself becomes a stim image as well.
“So you start this film thinking ‘What is this? What am I working out?’ and eventually, I feel like it guides you into just delight in the repetition and the stimulus of it. From the feedback we got when it played at Nottingham Castle, we had these big feedback books, and a lot of people said it really resonated with them and we created a fully accessible screening space for it with them. People could sit on the floor or on beanbags, or we had noise-cancelling headphones, so it was about creating a space as well.
“Traditionally, galleries, I feel, are quite oppressive and don’t feel super accessible. I feel we’ve created something that means that autistic people can really thrive in that environment, especially with a film that encourages delight in those images.”
Neurodiversity in the film industry
For other neurodivergent people looking to get into the film industry, Georgia shared the following advice: “I got some really good advice from a TA when I was studying abroad. I think I was doing some projects for class and I was struggling with what I was being asked of me, and the TA said to me, ‘Tell the stories that you have to tell, not what you think you should tell,’ and that resonated with me because I always felt like I have to make this better with this film.
“It really made me think I have stuff that is very central to me and stuff that I’ve masked or oppressed. I think I like making a lot of films about transformation, but also about movement and resisting restraint and that’s always why I felt like it wasn’t really something that people wanted to see.
“I would say it’s okay to ignore what is expected and make the thing that feels important for you. I know that sounds really basic, but it really helped me because, especially when I was at uni, I felt like I had to write a certain type of script and a certain type of genre and story. There are rules, but in your own filmmaking, there’s no one telling you how a documentary or a fiction film should and shouldn’t be.
“You can embrace it. If you’re someone who stims or you’re someone who feels like they move in a different way or in a different rhythm to the rest of the world, you can lean into that and you can create something that maybe no one’s ever seen before.
“Things that are repressed and things that are squashed down by neurotypical society, I think it’s always amazing to see those things being rediscovered. So I would encourage people to do that,
Steven concluded: “I think one of the things that was so rewarding about this project was co-creation and that doesn’t mean that you have to make the same artwork, but what was great sometimes is that we were creating next to each other.
“Sometimes we’d have meetings where we just drew. I think that perhaps if you can find ways to make work alongside others, I think that really can provide such a good sense of community sounding board and understanding your own needs in relation to others.”
Follow Steven Eastwood and Georgia Bradburn on Instagram.