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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 a sensory ethnographic documentary about Jin Li, a 29‑year‑old autistic artist from South Korea, as she navigates family life, art school, and a transnational art career between Korea and New York. The film centers Jin Li’s painting and her distinctive humming as forms of embodied, non‑verbal communication, asking how neurodivergent ways of being challenge normative expectations of language, intelligibility, and relationality. Rather than framing her communication as a deficit to be “translated,” the film treats her painting and vocalizations as a legitimate, rich language in their own right, one that resists easy assimilation into neurotypical frameworks.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and collaborative filmmaking, the documentary traces how Jin Li’s communication is received, interpreted, and often pathologized in clinical, familial, and public settings, while also showing how she and her family actively claim and defend her way of being. In doing so, it engages with linguistic and medical anthropology on embodied difference, exploring how pain, sensory variation, and atypical sociality shape and are shaped by diverse ecologies of interaction. The film also examines the moral and epistemic polarization that arises when certain forms of communication are deemed credible and real, while others are relegated to the margins as unintelligible or obscure.