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Film short abstract

A sensory ethnographic documentary about Jin Li, a 29-year-old autistic artist from South Korea, navigating family, art school, and a transnational art career. Through her painting and humming, the film explores how neurodivergent communication challenges normative ideas of relationality.

Film synopsis

The Cat that Lives in Your Dreams is an ethnographic documentary that follows Jin Li, an autistic Korean painter, as she travels with her family from Seoul to New York for a solo exhibition at Positive Exposure, a disability arts gallery. Rather than treating disability as something that needs to be "treated," the film tracks how Jin Li’s art and relationships move between Korean family- and church-based care worlds and Euro-American disability arts institutions, opening up possibilities for interpersonal connection and recognition in a polarised world.

Filmed over more than a year between Seoul and New York, the documentary foregrounds art-making as ethnographic evidence and centres Jin Li’s agency in decisions about filming, editing, and circulation. It lingers on Korean talk shows where she struggles with scripted speech, special-education classrooms and church gatherings where care is negotiated, and everyday routines with her sisters and mother. These scenes are then set against the New York exhibition, where her canvases and captions let her set the terms of encounter with curators, visitors, and disability communities. The film asks what counts as “credible” evidence of autistic life when it is already mediated through Korean family obligation, Protestant cure narratives, institutional assessments, and the expectations of Euro-American festivals and funders.

Formally, The Cat that Lives in Your Dreams draws on observational cinema and sensory ethnography—handheld camerawork at Jin Li’s eye level, long takes, and a soundscape built from brush sounds, humming, and overlapping conversations—to invite viewers into autistic temporalities without claiming transparent access to her interiority. For the EASA 2026 film programme, it offers a grounded case in how visual anthropology might respond to polarisation by cultivating disability-led, relational documentary practice, treating access work, consent, and shared authorship as conditions for imagining more livable transnational futures.