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Lived experience, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Kyle Goldfinch drew on his own dating life to write Neuromance
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney, the writer and producer of the short film Neuromance described where it came from, and the panel asked where autistic audiences find stories that give them hope.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
The short film Neuromance was screened at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024, and on the media panel Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, played a clip from it for the online audience. Then he asked its writer and producer, Kyle Goldfinch, what he had been thinking when he made it, and how close it was to his own life.
Goldfinch said he wrote and produced the film and came up with the original concept about five or six years earlier, while working at a film festival. He had been looking at his own life, his own ideas about dating and the many stories he had from it, and thinking about sensitivity and the ways the world can be over sensitive. Out of that came the idea of Nate, the film’s main character. He said he was proud to see the film reaching an audience, with screenings in Australia and internationally, and that people were seeing it as a love letter to a person whose brain is wired differently.
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Sources the story draws on
- Neuromance (FilmFreeway project page) (opens in a new tab), FilmFreeway
- Review: Amazon's 'As We See It' provides an incisive and emotional look at autism (opens in a new tab), NPR (Eric Deggans), carried by High Plains Public Radio
- Erotic Stories, SBS review: sexy in the right ways (opens in a new tab), ScreenHub (Mel Campbell)
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