Autism Plays Itself
2024 · 18m · UK
Directed by Janet Harbord
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, tender
Three autistic respondents watch and reinterpret archival 1957 clinical footage of autistic children filmed at Maudsley Hospital in London, forging a new soundtrack and perspective from an autistic point of view.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Autistic adults reclaiming the 1957 Maudsley clinical footage with their own commentary — riff on Los Angeles Plays Itself is a bold ambition and the format demands skill. If the wit lands this is excellent essay-film.
Harbord's title nods directly at Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself, and the gesture of reclaiming 1957 clinical footage through present-day autistic commentary is precisely the kind of essayistic intervention that justifies the form. Genuinely important.
18:07 essay-film flipping the gaze on 1957 Maudsley Hospital clinical footage — autistic respondents providing speculative commentary is exactly the structural device that converts pathologizing archive into reclamation, in the Los Angeles Plays Itself lineage. The runtime and respondent count let it actually breathe.
Reviews
Offering a rare and honest insight, this film is unique in its format, storytelling approach, and how it deciphers different ways of expression, all with humor and emotional depth.
An unusual meta-examination of how filmmaking and the scientific craft intermix, the film fascinatingly seeks to reframe autistic identity away from a clinical past that viewed it as alien and disordered.
Festivals
- Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival 2024, Best International Short Documentary
- Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024
- London Short Film Festival 2025
- ReFrame Film Festival 2025
- Archivio Aperto