(Reviews of Misericordia; The Return; Irena's Vow; War Paint: Women At War; and The Stimming Pool)
MISERICORDIA.
Mention Alain Guiraudie and most cineastes will immediately think of Stranger By the Lake (2013). But he had made five features prior to that queer classic and has since directed the unpersuasive and rather overlooked dramedies, Staying Vertical (2016) and Nobody's Hero (2022). However, he's back on the thriller trail with Misericordia, which manages to invoke the spirits of Alfred Hitchcock, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Claude Chabrol, and Bruno Dumont - and that's no mean achievement in itself. But, in touching upon the decline of rural communities, could Guiraudie even be riffing on Marcel Pagnol's The Baker's Wife (1938)?
When his former employer dies, Jérémie Pastor (Félix Kysyl) drives from Toulouse to the small rural village of St Martial for the funeral. He is welcomed by the widowed Martine (Catherine Frot ). But son Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand) is less than pleased when he accepts an offer to stay for a few days and discusses keeping the bakery going with Martine. Vincent is also put out when Jérémie calls on his friend, Walter (David Ayala), who lives alone on the farm he inherited from his parents.
They wrestle in the woods and the parish priest, Fr Philippe Grisolles (Jacques Develay), asks if things are okay when he comes across them while out foraging for mushrooms. Vincent is furious when Martine gives Jérémie some of his father's old clothes and takes to detouring from his route to work to drop into his room in the very early morning to intimidate him. He accuses Jérémie of having designs on his mother, but she always felt he had a crush on her spouse when he worked at the bakery.
Disconcerted by a clumsy advance over a glass of pastis, Walter chases Jérémie off his land at gunpoint. As he walks home, Vincent passes and drives them to a remote spot in the woods. They fight and Jérémie kills Vincent by caving in his skull with a rock. Waiting for dusk, he buries the body and drives the car to the nearby town of Milau, so that is looks as though Vincent had wandered off.
Martine is cross with Jérémie for not telling her that he was going to spend the night at Walter's. He makes up a story about getting drunk and crashing in a barn and it satisfies Martine and Vincent's worried wife, Annie (Tatiana Spivakova). After showering (with Martine barging in on him to get his washing), he goes to the woods and picks mushrooms from the burial site to stop anyone disturbing it. Bumping into the priest, he makes small talk, but feels his eyes fixing on him when he gets home to give Martine and Annie a fabricated account of getting dumped in Milau after Vincent had driven round lamenting the loss of his father.
Having patched things up with Walter (who tells him that Vincent would never have gone off without his car), Jérémie feels more secure. But Fr Grisolles pulls him into the confessional at the church and tells him (in a roundabout way) that he knows he killed Vincent, but would be prepared to keep his secret if Jérémie becomes his lover. Realising he has no option, he agrees after the priest assures him that they will be discreet.
Arriving back at the bakery to find two gendarmes waiting for him (Sébastien Faglain and Salomé Lopes), Jérémie endures a grilling with Martine and Walter listening in. He admits his story sounds implausible, but insists they drove around all night until Vincent threw him out. Once they're alone, Martine asks Jérémie if he had sex with her son and he feels unnerved enough to try a moonlight flit. But Fr Grisolles suggests this would look suspicious and he decides to sit tight.
The cops watch Jérémie picking mushrooms and start picking holes in his story because they know Vincent well and don't believe he would just flounce off. He tells them about the fight and is beginning to waver when Fr Grisolles strides up and declares that he met Jérémie on the way back from Milau and that they had wound up in bed together after he had offered him the use of his shower. Shrugging, the gendarmes accept the story and agree that there is no need to make the relationship public. That night, after the police reveal that they are going to search the woods more thoroughly, Jérémie is woken by the male cop sitting on the bed to ask where he buried Vincent's body.
Martine assures him that it was merely a nightmare. But, even though she locks the front door, the cop gets in the next night and Jérémie beats a retreat to the presbytery. Fr Philippe order him to strip and the gendarme finds them in bed together when he uses his skeleton key to gain admittance. The erect cleric chases him away before urging Jérémie to dress so they can exhume the body under cover of darkness and hide it in the church cemetery. As he waits for the priest to bury the corpse, Jérémie bumps into Martine, who takes him home to bed. He asks if they can snuggle, but she suggests they first start by holding hands.
Requiring more than a little suspension of disbelief, this darkly comic murder story gnaws away at the viewer's scepticism until they become a colluder in the kinky conspiracy. Fr Grisolles actually makes us complicit, as he prevents Jérémie from throwing himself off a ledge overlooking St Martial by reminding him that people overlook all sorts of crimes in their daily lives. Indeed, he claims that murders are a necessary part of existence, as they are sometimes useful and afford people the opportunity to exhibit compassion and mercy.
Sexual repression and religious hypocrisy are hardly new topics in French cinema, but Guiraudie puts a new spin on them, as he up-ends Pasolini's scenario in Teorema (1968) by having the mysterious intruder become the casualty rather than the provocateur. He's not seemingly concerned about the past events that fomented the present situation or bothered by the fact that the police investigation is a shambles and that Annie seems indifferent to the disappearance of her son's father. Instead, Guiraudie delights in focussing on Félix Kysyl's dawning sense of entrapment, as the unscrupulous Jacques Develay and the stealthy Catherine Frot weave their webs. Has there been a more unappetising lunch than the one in which the trio consume the morel mushrooms that have sprung up on Vincent's shallow grave?
Marc Verdaguer's score heightens the sense of menace that is steadily ratcheted up by Jean-Christophe Hym's relentlessly measured editing. Claire Mathon's disorientating subjective trawls through the village's narrow winding streets and the dense thickets of woodland only make it more apparent that while Jérémie may not have wound up behind bars, he is anything but free.
THE RETURN.
Although he has directed Machan (2008), Still Life (2013), and Nowhere Special (2020), Uberto Pasolini will forever be remembered as the producer of Peter Cattaneo's The Full Monty (1997). He goes back a long way with Ralph Fiennes, having produced Christopher Menaul's A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia (1992). Now, the nephew of Luchino Visconti reunites Fiennes with Juliette Binoche, his co-star in Peter Kosminsky's Wuthering Heights (1992) and Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996), in The Return, a reworked passage of Homer's verse epic, The Odyssey
Two decades after her husband left Ithaca for the Trojan War, Penelope (Juliette Binoche) refuses to believe that Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) is dead. Suitors camp outside the palace waiting for her to choose a new spouse. However, as she fears for the safety of her son, Telemachus (Charlie Plummer), she keeps delaying a decision and frustrates Antinous (Marwan Kenzari) and Eurymachus (Jamie Andrew Cutler) by insisting that she can only consider her options when she has finished weaving a funeral shroud for her ailing father-in-law, Laertes (Nikitas Tsakiroglou).
When Odysseus washes up on the shore looking like a beggar, he is given sanctuary by Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria) the swineherd, although he doesn't recognise his king even after he tells him the story of the wooden horse of Troy. Scarred by the conflict and ashamed that he has survived when his men perished, Odysseus doubts whether Penelope would want him back.
When Laertes dies, Oysseus watches the funeral procession and sees Penelope inform Antinous that she will turn the shroud into a wedding shawl. However, she unpicks her work each night to delay the completion of the garment and the suitors become so restless that Telemachus feels the need to flee to another island. Remaining in his beggarly disguise, Odysseus asks Eumaeus to take him to the palace. He is touched to find his old hunting dog waiting for him outside the gates and pats it when it rolls over to die after having kept its vigil.
Inside, Odysseus is appalled by the way the suitors lounge around and drunkenly take advantage of the servant girls. Finding a bowl, he claims to be a hungry war veteran, but is mocked and forced to fight a giant in order to demonstrate his warrior skills. He kills the man and the suitors cause such a commotion that Penelope comes to investigate. She asks to be alone with the stranger, but doesn't seem to recognise him as they talk by firelight. However, his old nursemaid, Eurycleia (Ángela Molina), spots a telltale scar on his knee when she is ordered to wash him, but Odysseus swears her to secrecy.
When Telemachus returns, Antinous scours the island for him with sniffer dogs. Odysseus leads his son to safety across a pool to throw the hounds off the scent. But Telemachus has nothing but contempt for his father for staying away for so long and subjecting Penelope to humiliation. He returns to the palace to learn that Antinous has caught his mother picking at her weaving and has ordered her to announce her decision the following day.
Addressing the hopefuls, Penelope declares that she will marry the man who can string Odysseus's bow and emulate his feat of firing an arrow through the holes in a row of axe heads. None of the men can even stretch the string and Antinous accuses Penelope of playing for time again. But Odysseus comes forward and completes the task. When the suitors rise up, he kills them with his remaining arrows, while Telemachus beheads Antinous with his sword, in spite of his mother begging him for clemency.
Telemachus insists on setting sail on a voyage of self-discovery, while Penelope shows Odysseus that she had hidden their marriage bed in an attic because she couldn't bear the thought of sleeping in it without him. They agree they have much to discuss before things can return to normal, but Penelope is convinced that Odysseus's return is good for her and Ithaca.
Anyone hoping for a Ray Harryhausenesque excursion to Antiquity will be disappointed, as this sombre drama is bereft of sirens and sea monsters and has much more in common with Pier Paolo Pasolini's adaptations of Sophocles's Oedipus Rex (1967) and Euripedes's Medea (1969). Scripted by John Collee and the late Edward Bond, the action has a gravitas that is reinforced by the ascetic intensity of the performances by Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche. They only share a couple of scenes, but the tentative reunion across the expanse of a dimly lit hall and the intimate bedroom reconciliation are enacted with a finesse that permits hints of the pain, penitence, and passion that Penelope and Odysseus are feeling after so many traumatic years apart.
Marwan Kenzari cloaks Antinous's lust and ambition with cunning charm, but the remainder of the suitors are rather sketchily limned. Telemachus is also poorly served by the writers, although it doesn't help that Charlie Plummer has chosen to play him as a kind of himation-clad Kurt Cobain. His contribution to the showdown is about as convincing as the quiver slung over Odysseus's shoulder that keeps miraculously refilling before emptying just as he's left with a manageable number of foes to slay with a sword.
Such oddities aside, this is a worthy retelling that has been authentically designed by Giuliano Pannuti, watchfully photographed by Marius Panduru, and poignantly scored by Rachel Portman, who is Pasolini's ex-wife. The direction occasionally strays to the ponderous side of stately. But Homer's assured insight into human nature is so timeless that several of the themes retain their relevance in the third decade of the 21st century, with its toxic masculinity, post-traumatic stress disorders, survivor guilt, cancel culture hypocrisy, and its perverse senses of grievance, entitlement, and supremacy.
IRENA'S VOW.
To date, Canadian director Louise Archambault has worked exclusively in French. However, she now follows Familia (2005), Gabrielle (2013), And the Birds Rained Down, Thanks For Everything (both 2019), and One Summer (2023) with her English-language debut. Adapted by Dan Gordon from his own 2009 stage play, Irena's Vow is based on the wartime experiences of Polish nurse, Irena Gut, who emigrated to America with the help of United Nations worker and future husband, William Opdyke, and said nothing about her astonishing act of heroic humanity until the 1970s.
Having survived the shelling of the hospital where she was training to be a nurse, 19 year-old Irena Gut (Sophie Nélisse) is plucked from a Catholic church by Major Eduard Rügemer of the invading Wehrmacht to work in a munitions factory. When she faints, he has her transferred to the hotel run by Schultz (Andrzej Seweryn), who instructs her to keep her head down and puts her in charge of the Jews who have been selected to attend to the tailoring needs of the soldiers and secretaries.
When she meets them, Irena discovers that Clara (Agata Turkot) and Thomas (Filip Kosior), Moise (Krzysztof Szczepaniak) and Zosia (Irena Melcer), and Lazar (Aleksandar Milicevic) and Ida (Eliza Rycembel) are married couples. None has tailoring experience and neither do Alex (Rafal Mohr), Abram (Eryk Kulm), Joseph (Rafal Mackowiak), Marian (Mateusz Mosiewicz), or Fanka (Zuzanna Pulawska). But they have lied to save themselves and Irena feels responsible for them, even though any slippage in standards could lead to her own dismissal.
Appalled by the sight of Rokita (Maciej Nawrocki) snatching a baby from its mother's arms and dashing it to the ground (before stomping on its head and shooting the woman), Irena struggles to retain her composure as she serves him that night. But she does overhear that plans to eradicate Jews from Tarnopol are being stepped up and she urges her tailors to find a place to hide.
Rügemer then appoints Irena as his housekeeper at a villa he has requisitioned and she tells the tailors that she will hide them in the basement because no one would think of looking there. However, they need to find sanctuary before she can smuggle them in and she chooses a vent in Rügemer's hotel bedroom and drugs his nightcap so she can get the 11 Jews out of the hotel and across town to the villa.
With the tailors helping her, Irena helps Rügemer host a dinner party and succeeds in persuading him not to impose a live-in orderly (as she is scared of soldiers after being raped during the Russian occupation). When he finds rats in the cellar, she moves them into a room beneath the garden, as the previous owners had been Jewish and had built their own hiding place. She brings paper for writing and drawing and a pack of cards, as well as wire to rig up an alarm system.
All is going well until Helen (Sharon Azrieli) asks Irena to shelter her Jewish husband, Henry (Tomasz Tyndyk), who had previously been Rokita's butler. The tailors are divided about adding him to their number, but they agree to him coming. However, one of the locals is spying on the house and the SS come to search. Rügemer is livid and sends them packing. But he's even more outraged when Irena doctors a blackmail note sent to her to make it look as though Rügemer is being threatened. He's impressed with Irena when she acts as decoy to drop the cash at the station.
Time passes and Ida gets pregnant. As a Catholic and having seen the baby killed in the street, Irena tells the tailors that she has taken a vow to save any life and they all agree not to let medical student Moise risk an abortion. On the night of a party, they almost have cause to regret the decision when Rokita takes his secretary to the gazebo for sex and they have to stop Ida from crying out when she has contractions.
Shortly after Irena witnesses Rokita supervise a public hanging of some Poles who had been hiding Jews, she is caught chatting to three of the women by Rügemer. He pulls a gun on her, but suddenly becomes melancholic and tells her he is tired of the war and its aims. As he loves her, he offers her the chance to become his mistress (in spite of the 40-year age gap) in return for keeping her secret and she agrees through duressful tears.
Spat at when she goes to the street market in a fur-trimmed coat and sneered at by gossiping secretaries at a party, Irena receives comfort from Schultz, who has noticed from previous receptions that she always squirrels away the leftovers and he promises to keep quiet, while wanting to know nothing. As the guests belt out Christmas carols, the tailors sing Hanukkah songs in hushed tones, while passing a candle around the circle.
Frustrated that reports have reached Berlin that he has lost his grip because of his fixation with a Polish girl, Rügemer tells Irena that he has been summoned back to Germany and expects her to join him after she closes up the house and entrusts the tailors to the resistance. She is jailed by the Soviets as a German collaborator and a partisan. But Helen arranges for her to escape in a vegetable van and Henry gets her a Jewish passport so she can travel west.
Closing captions detail meeting Opdyke in a displaced person's camp and lived in the United States with their daughter, Jeannie. Ida and Lazar's son, Roman, was born in the forest and they shared their home with the destitute Rügemer for having saved their lives. Rokita beat a war crimes charge in 1954 and lived another 21 years. Nine years later, Irena was reunited with her four sisters, who had been dispersed after surviving the war. She also got to meet Roman and the film ends with footage of their embrace.
Related with sincerity and restraint, this is a remarkable story that deserves to be more widely known. Resisting melodramatic moments of shock and suspense, Archambault directs steadily, trusting in the facts to make an impression. But, in focussing on the cat-and-mouse game, she neglects to expose the horrific brutality of the Nazi regime in Poland or the anti-Semitism of so many ordinary Poles.
She makes intelligent use of the villa to convey the proximity of the Jews and their persecutors during the receptions. But the decision to shoot the odd scene in the streets - presumably to open out the stage scenario - dissipates the sense of confinement. Similarly, the absence of any timescales makes it difficult to locate proceedings (which range from 1939 to 1945) within the overall chronicle of the conflict.
In a watchful performance, Sophie Nélisse makes Irena as vulnerable as she is resourceful. But there's not a lot of depth or any notion that she has already been through an ordeal after the Soviet partition. As the sixtysomething Rügemer, Dougray Scott largely avoids the `good Nazi' pitfalls, although we are never told how he occupies his days (which feels important, given the surprising revelation in the captions). However, the Jewish characters are markedly less rounded and we learn little about the pressures of subsisting in cramped, damp confinement. Indeed, apart from the sequence in which the tailors reveal their pre-war occupations, they are essentially ciphers, which makes this as much a Gentile saviour narrative as it is an account of Holocaust survival, even though Irena was honoured by Yad Vashem as one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations in 1982.
WAR PAINT: WOMEN AT WAR.
Although her best film is Hermitage Revealed (2014), Margy Kinmonth has acquired a reputation for exploring the connection between art and warfare. Now, following War Art With Eddie Redmayne (2015), Revolution: New Art For a New World (2016), and Eric Ravilious: Drawn to War (2022), she has directed War Paint: Women At War, which seeks to mine a century of creativity to discover whether men and women see different things when it comes to recording conflict.
At the Venice Biennale, Kinmonth meets Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova, who is exhibiting a pipe organ made out of shell cases collected from the front line. Another of her installations, `Palianytsia', has been made from the river stones that Kadyrova collected as a refugee in Transcarpathia. As each resembled a loaf, she sliced the stones to resemble the `welcome bread' that is always given to visitors in Ukrainian households. However, the title has another significance, as it has been used as a password since the 2022 invasion, as Russians find the word hard to pronounce.
Kadyrova also uses tiles from bombed buildings to create pieces that look like garments on coat hangers. She insists on working on the front line, but removed her park sculpture, `Deer', from Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region in August 2024.
In 1982, Linda Kitson became the first official female war artist to accompany British troops into battle when she covered the Falklands War. She recalls the cold, the danger, and the pressure of sketching during engagements. Yet, while she produced hundreds of drawings, she regrets not recording the gruesome burn injuries suffered by those aboard RFA Sir Galahad, as the men didn't want their families to see such horror.
Shirin Neshat left Iran before the 1979 revolution and now lives in New York, where her frontline topic is the silencing of women. She likes to use calligraphy based on subversive verses by women poets and her fascination with sensuality, power, and violence have resulted in such landmark collections as Women of Allah. Neshat has also produced video installations about the subjugation of women, although censorship means that little of her work has been seen in Iran itself.
Harking rather abruptly back to the Second World War, Kinmonth speaks to novelist Penelope Lively about her artist aunt, Rachel Reckitt, who recorded the effects of the Blitz on London in a series of wood engravings that captured the damage to ordinary homes and the poverty endured by those with nowhere to go. Lively discusses the impact the work had on Reckitt as a person, but nothing is offered by way of analysis or an evaluation of her significance as a woman war artist.
Kinmonth rightly laments that too many war works by women have been hidden away. But, while she shows a few untitled or dated pictures by Olga Lehmann, Gladys Hynes, and Priscilla Thornycroft, she doesn't bother to contextualise them. Instead, she moves on to Dame Laura Knight, the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy, whose portrait of munitions factory machinist Ruby Loftus was worth its weight in propaganda gold. So was `A Balloon Site, Coventry', which made the task of setting barrage defences seem exciting and glamorous as part of a recruitment drive to an invisible army of women.
Among the codebreakers at Bletchley Park was the director's late mother, Kathleen Kinmonth-Warren, who was commemorated on a postage stamp. Another source of inspiration was the American photographer, Lee Miller, who is remembered by her curator granddaughter, Ami Bouhassane. She is particularly struck by a picture of an ATS searchlight battery that was fired on just after Miller snapped them. Luckily, they all survived on that occasion.
Miller's Vogue pictures were exhibited in an effort to get Isolationist America to support the war. But that subject is dropped as soon as it's raised, as Kinmonth shuttles to New York to ask photographer Nina Berman for her view on the American perspective on war today. She decries the fact that the US economy is geared to funding what she calls `war-making' and criticises propaganda for making combat seductive (which was precisely what Knight did at the behest of the British government during the very different days of World War II). We see her photographing a giant quilt at a flash protest outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (but nothing is said about the pro-Palestinian cause that's being advocated).
She shows some pictures taken in Afghanistan and avers that stories have been missed because women were not in the field to use their unique access to record them. Berman also astutely notes that wars never end, as they have sequential aftermaths, such as the legacy of the rapes committed by US troops in Vietnam. Yet these stories have not been widely reported as the military industrial complex doesn't want these truths to be known.
The nuns who stitched the Bayeux Tapestry knew that rape was used as a weapon, however, and Dutch artist Marcelle Hanselaar continues the tradition in her engravings. She says too much male-dominated war art errs towards glorification or sentimentalisation and, as a result, there has been no room for graphic depictions of assaults whose purpose is to undermine the structures of a vanquished society.
Born in Kirkuk, Jananne Al-Ani left with her father behind when she fled with her mother and sisters. But we're not told when or why, as we see clips from a split-screen and images of women covering their faces with their hands. Such intriguing ambiguity is passed over with indecent haste, as Kinmonth heads to the hidden conflict in Sudan to see how graffiti artist Assil Diab reflects the situation. Her `Martyrs' project is particularly significant, as she pays tribute to those who died in the 2019 revolution. It's also risky, as she's on the street painting on walls in the public gaze.
After showing witness drawings from the 2005 civil war in Darfour, Kinmonth joins Charlotte Johnstone to recall how ambulance driver grandmother Doris Zinkeisen became the first artist to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945. Her `Human Laundry' painting moves Dame Rachel Whiteread. But she's blithely sidelined (for the moment) so we can join Laura Knight at the Nuremberg Trials, where she added a landscape of the benighted city to the incredible detail of the courtroom scene.
Fiona Banner specialises in war planes and we see her `Disarm' film, in which she seeks to highlight that air shows and ceremonial fly pasts are a celebration of conflict. Maggi Hambling claims subjects choose the artist rather than the other way round and recalls how a front page photo inspired `Gulf Women Prepare For War' (1986). She also explains how the `War Requiem and Aftermath' series was painted from the imagination. Kinmonth (who is Hambling's former student) shows her Knight's `Corporal J.D.M. Pearson, GC, WAAF' (1940) and discloses that she was ordered to replace the gun in her sitter's hand with a gas mask.
As we see poppies being manufactured for Armistice Day, artist Cornelia Parker claims that art is the flipside of war because it upholds the truth that invariably becomes the first casualty of any conflict. Her film, War Machine, was produced to mark the centenary of the end of the Great War. She made the machinery pause (which it doesn't do in actuality) and notes that many of the 80 million that are made each year go to 80 countries with colonial connections.
The first woman to win the Turner Prize, Rachel Whiteread describes how she created her nameless library for the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna. It's a masterpiece and Kinmonth follows her rightly reverential views of it with an encounter with Maya Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Monument in Washington, DC after winning a competition in 1981 at the age of 21. She recalls the prejudice she faced and the abuse she received, with a partner in her firm opining that the shiny black marble was `too feminine'.
From the epic to the intimate, Kinmonth meets Mehzebin Adam-Suter, the curator of the Red Cross Museum, to learn about a quilt that was embroidered by women in the Changi prison camp in Singapore. It's a work of humbling simplicity that speaks to the courage and hope of its makers. In summation, Kinmonth recognises the value of war art in recording and memorialising, while also speaking truth to power and reminding us all of our common humanity.
An overdue film on an under-examined topic, this will alert many to artists who should be much better known. Unfortunately, this is also as muddled as it's mettlesome, as Kinmonth flits between periods with little rhyme or reason. Her own presence can also sometimes feel distracting, if only because the timbre of the question and answer in the interviews is so noticeably different. Some of the remarks in the narration also feel a bit sweeping and superficial.
But Kinmonth's choice of artists can't be faulted, as she highlights such overlooked conflicts as those in Sudan, while also recalling more familiar names from the Second World War. It might have been useful to name and date the artworks, but Exhibition on Screen have rather spoilt us in this regard, as they have when it comes for capturing textures and details within a canvas.
Deficiencies in historical contextualising and critical analysis will bother some more than others. But one wonders whether a feature was the right format for such an important subject, especially as so many artists have had to be omitted, while a few of those who have been included have been short-changed. The lack of depth on the Taliban's treatment of women and the activities of groups like Boko Haram in Nigeria is equally regrettable. Nevertheless, this is a useful primer, with the section on rape as a weapon being the provocative standout.
THE STIMMING POOL.
Reviews should never contain the first person pronoun. But I wouldn't presume to know how to write - with any useful insight - aboutt The Stimming Pool, a docufictional film that was built around the concept of `an autistic camera'. It was made over 12 days (with the assistance of artist and academic Steven Eastwood) by the Neurocultures Collective that is comprised of Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles, Lucy Walker. All that can be said with any certainty is that it needs to be shown and seen.
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