Community Cinema at UCL East: The Stimming Pool & Open Discussion

English | Experimental Film | 70 mins | 2024 | 12A

The narrative unfolds through an autistic camera, capturing diverse subjects navigating environments both challenging and comforting. Characters, some concealing their autism, others thriving in their communities, share a common goal: finding a space free from societal norms.

"A drifting, hybrid form captured by an 'autistic' camera disrupts the normative concept of life, experienced by neurotypicals"​ — LITTLE WHITE LIES

Co-created by the Neurocultures Collective (Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker) and artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood, the film’s drifting form is built around the concept of an autistic camera. The curiosity of this camera discovers a relay of subjects, including ROBIN Elliott-Knowles, a B-Movie film club host; SAM, a young woman taking part in a diagnostic eye tracking test, the SHAPESHIFTER, an office worker who is masking their autistic nature; and CHESS, an enigmatic dog spirit. These characters stray through the world, revealing environments often hostile to autistic experience - such as a hectic workplace and a crowded pub - and quiet spaces that offer respite from them. Sometimes the camera wanders off without any guide, finding an ancient woodland, an abandoned testing centre, even a fragment from an animated zombie film set in the American civil war.

The project’s co-direction and apprenticeship structure offers opportunity, inclusion and visibility for neurodivergent creatives, who are often obliged to explain their identity to audiences rather than play a central part in how representations are formed. The film takes a progressive approach to film production, playing to the individual strengths and aspirations of Neurocultures Collective members, with every person contributing to the film’s authorship. This method of production seeks to create new vantage points into the complex ecologies of filmmaking to explore how currently inadequate models might evolve to empower neurodiverse artists, audiences, and communities.

Followed by a Q&A and open discussion with the filmmakers.

• 6:00 PM – Doors open
• 6:30 PM – Film screening (70 mins)
• 7:40 PM – 5-minute break
• 7:45 PM – Q&A / open discussion
• 8:00 PM – Event ends

This screening will be relaxed: Lights will remain on low, and the volume will be turned down slightly.

The doors will open half an hour before the screening starts, so you have time to pick your seat and get settled.

The cinema is wheelchair accessible.

Please feel free to leave, return and move around the space during the screening. Stimming welcome.

There will be a signposted quiet space outside the cinema. We will not screen any trailers.

There will be an open discussion after the screening, where you will be able to ask questions. Paper and pens will be provided if you would prefer to write your question down.

If you have any questions, please get in contact with us: [email protected]

DIRECTED BY THE NEUROCULTURES COLLECTIVE

(Sam Chown Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker) & STEVEN EASTWOOD

PRODUCED BY

​FUNDED BY

​SUPPORTED BY

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UCL East cinema, UCL, London, United Kingdom

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