Enjoying the silver screen experience

Aug 22 2007 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

A Liverpool cinema is helping children with autism watch their favourite films. Laura Davis reports

OSCAR KIMMANCE loves villains. Not just any old villains, mind you. They have to be particularly good ones – the more devilish the better – and they have to be animated.

One of the best things about these characters is that you can go to the cinema to watch them getting up to their dastardly deeds, but sometimes the nine-year-old finds that when he sits down in front of the big screen he suddenly can’t bear being there.

Like many children with autism, Oscar finds the bright lights and loud soundtrack difficult to cope with. Yet, with just a few alterations, the cinema can be a fun and beneficial experience.

This is something the Picturehouse at FACT, on Wood Street, Liverpool, has discovered, and is now running regularly “autism-friendly screenings” around every six weeks.

“I can’t tell you how wonderful it is for a woman who’s tried to get her son into the cinema for the past five years with varying degrees of success,” exclaims Oscar’s mum, Lesley Kimmance.

“I take him to our local cinema, but we tend to have to go in early and sit in an empty cinema for half an hour and get used to it. The lights are up and there’s not a lot of noise. He has a run around.

“It’s a huge thing to plan any sort of visit anywhere with an autistic child, so to have an organisation such as FACT putting on these sort of screenings is fantastic.”

Oscar was diagnosed with autism at the age of 2½, and it has taken a lot of determination from his parents to get him where he is today.

“I think I realised there was something that wasn’t right from about 18 months.

“Originally he didn’t have any speech, now I actually have to tell him to shut up, which is amazing,” says Lesley, 43.

“At 2½, it was unlikely he would speak. He has done exceptionally well and we have to keep pushing him.

“We still have the lying on the floor, tantrums and screams sometimes.”

One of the difficulties of having an autistic child is dealing with the responses of strangers, who assume that he is misbehaving when he is just finding his environment hard to cope with.

“One of the problems is going out and doing everyday things because of his reaction and other people’s.

“It’s difficult because my child looks no different to anyone else’s child. Nobody knows there’s anything wrong with him so you have comments made to you or shakes of the head.

“If I had a child with Down Syndrome, that wouldn’t happen.”

Another hurdle is finding social activities for Oscar to take part in.

It is especially important that he mixes with other children because this is something that people with autism find difficult and have to be encouraged to get used to.

“We have to constantly push him into ‘normal’ social situations, whether that’s restaurants, cinemas, parties holidays or aeroplanes, all the things that he would find stressful.

“Going to the cinema is great because it’s a social activity, which autistic children find so hard, and it’s doing something that they love – watching films and their favourite characters,” says Lesley, a home ownership advisory officer for housing association Regender.

“But when you go to some of the multi-screen cinemas, they are sensory overload for somebody like Oscar – it’s lights, it’s loud, it’s busy, it’s noisy. I couldn’t take him somewhere like the Odeon at Switch Island, that just couldn’t happen.”

The solution is so simple that it seems astonishing that nobody has thought of it before.

During autism-friendly screenings at FACT, the house lights are kept bright and the sound is turned down lower than usual.

Jan Carlyle, Picturehouse’s marketing manager, explains: “We were really responding to an audience demand, we spoke to one of our customers who said she had tried to take her son to the cinema eight times and children with autism find it very difficult to go to the cinema because of the light problems.

“A normal cinema screen is very dark and the sound is very loud and it puts a lot of people with autism off and they have to leave the cinema or just don’t find it very comfortable.

“So the lights are raised slightly and the sound is lowered. And also it means that people with autism might make a noise or need to go out several times and it would disturb other customers, so by providing a special screening for them it means they know they can totally relax.”

The screenings have been held for around 12 months now, and the scheme has been so successful that it has been rolled out to other Picturehouse cinemas across the UK.

Picturehouse is now asking for feedback from people who attend them to ensure they are being programmed for the right time of day and showing the sort of films that children with autism would enjoy watching.

So far they have shown mostly animations, including Flushed Away, Shark Tale and Happy Feet. The next screening, this time of The Simpsons Movie, will take place on Saturday, September 8, and Monday, September 10, at 12pm.

Audiences usually number around 20, including people with autism, carers, parents and schoolteachers.

“We had a fantastic comment from a lady who said she had been to the cinema eight times and every time she’s had to leave because her son couldn’t cope, and she brought him to one of our screenings and he sat through the whole thing. She was blown away,” says Jan.

Lesley, who lives in Crosby, adds: “Screening the films like this makes a huge amount of difference because autistic children are overly sensitive to what’s going on around them. It can just be too much – the noise combined with the big screen, combined with the darkness. The smallest changes means it impacts on them less and makes them less anxious.

“Oscar has just come out of a five-year Thomas the Tank Engine obsession. We’re now on Walt Disney, anything to do with the villains.

“He tends to like characters with extreme facial expressions, like Thomas because he has this huge face.

“Most autistic children have to be taught people’s facial expressions.

“My son had to be taught the difference between a happy face and a sad face and now he’s older he now understands a frustrated face or a bored face or a tired face but everything’s had to be taught.

“The thought that he could go to the cinema and see a new Disney film with a particularly good villain in it is just wonderful.”

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk

Autism – the facts

FIRST identified in 1943, autism is now believed to touch the lives of more than half a million families in the UK.

People with the condition find it more difficult to relate to those around them and often struggle to communicate.

It is harder for them to establish friendships as they cannot easily recognise other people’s emotional expressions.

People with autism generally experience three main areas of difficulty, known as the triad of impairments.

These are: social interaction, sometimes appearing aloof and indifferent to other people; social communication, difficulty with verbal and non-verbal communication, sometimes not fully understanding the meaning of common gestures, facial expressions or tone of voice; and social imagination, having a limited range of imaginative activities.

The causes of autism remains unknown, but research suggests that genetics plays a role.

It may also be associated with a variety of conditions affecting brain development which occur around the time of birth.

FURTHER information is available from the National Autistic Society at www.nas.org.uk or tel: 0845 070 4004.