Film: audio description

(Film): Culture expressed through gesture, sensations all over, and the way the world understands itself: we don’t want to put anything in here that doesn’t make it better. A 20 minute film, played on loop, is projected on a large 3 by 4 metre wide screen which has been hung in front of a black curtain. The film presents diverse people sitting or standing in relaxed postures or stimming, all in front of a hand painted blue and orange abstract sky. At times the camera captures close-ups of their faces, torsos, in and out of focus. While the people discuss their lived experience of autism, they often express their stimming as they describe it, such as: eating various types of food, skin stroking, hair twirling, arm flailing, painting, palms pressing into one another, skin being pushed and manipulated, lips sucked, and fingers tapping. There are further glimpses of these physical details recorded through a macro lens, conveying extreme close up imagery of fingers, eyes, skin, hair, and other fragments of the interviewees stimming. After the interview, spoken section, when the music takes over, there are close ups of tactile and sensory interactions between human and environment - exploring ideas of stimming: A person dances. Hands rub a pea over lips. Hands touch fabric, tracing the patterns in decorative wool. Hands draw. Marbles are rubbed. Water drips down surfaces. Soft looking material tenderly rubbed. A face covered in vibrant blue and gold paint, the cracks and lines of their skin seen through the thick layers of paint. Polished covered nails that prod and pull. A series of moving images of the sea - corals of various shapes with the current pulling and pushing them, all within a neon blue and green light. Fabric being pulled over a face that bundles in thick golden piles, looking like ridges of great desert plains.