The short film Floortime (12 minutes) is available at the top of the page.
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The short film Floortime, written and directed by Brachi Haisherik, aligns with recent trend in in contemporary cinema rooted in lived experience. Through a contemplative lens, it examines female experience, otherness, and a culturally constrained environment. Its premise appears simple: a mother of an autistic child tries to establish eye contact with her son. The film draws directly from Haisherik’s own experience as a mother to a child with autism. What appears to be a minor gesture becomes, for her, a moment charged with emotional, cultural, and existential significance. It is also a moment that compels her to step beyond the conventions that shaped her upbringing as an ultra-Orthodox woman.
Although the film emerges from personal experience, and provides an autobiographical dimension, Haisherik does not limit it to conveying one’s memory. Haisherik constructs it through a series of artistic decisions, the most central being the casting of her sister, Henya Broadbeker. Like the character she portrays, Broadbeker is the mother of a child with autism. Her son Arri appears alongside her, not as a trained actor but as a child with autism. This casting reshapes the film’s structure, blurring the boundary between fiction and documentary. Broadbeker, a filmmaker in her own right, and her son previously appeared in the autobiographical documentary The Three of Us (2023), which traces the relationship between the parents and their son.
In conversation, Brachi Haisherik describes how the decision to cast her nephew rather than a trained child actor stemmed from a desire “to let it happen on set” and to bring something real into the film. This choice places Floortime within a tradition of intimate realist cinema, in which the camera does not attempt to stage reality, but to observe it.
The film does not present autism as a dramatic issue or an exceptional condition, but situates it within a relational context. In this, it distances itself from familiar cinematic representations of autism, such as Rain Man or Temple Grandin, in which the autistic character becomes the central dramatic figure, defined either through otherness or exceptional genius. Floortime offers a different perspective: the child is not presented as different, but as a son within a relationship. Autism is not the subject of the film, but a condition in which the relationship between mother and son takes shape. This relationship takes on an additional layer of meaning within the ultra-Orthodox cultural context in which the film is set.
Haisherik reflects that the writing process revealed a tension between the ideal of motherhood she was raised with as a young ultra-Orthodox woman and the reality of motherhood. In a society where motherhood is understood as inseparable from a woman’s identity, this tension becomes a central dramatic element that does not necessarily find expression in words. The film conveys it through glances, gestures, and hesitation.
Haisherik elaborates on a close creative collaboration with cinematographer Boaz Yehonatan Yacov, shaped in part by his familiarity with the ultra-Orthodox world and related props. During the location search, it was important to find a home that would reflect the character’s inner world, a space defined by a heavy bookcase, enclosed interiors, and a clear sense of boundaries. This choice shapes the film’s visual language, with the physical space reflecting the character’s emotional state. The home becomes the setting for the mother’s internal struggle. The camera observes the characters with restraint, and the contrast between the home’s boundaries and the gentleness of the gaze shapes the film’s structure.
One of the more compelling aspects of the film is the way Arri Broadbeker performs in front of the camera. Brachi Haisherik explains that Arri was already used to being filmed following the documentary his mother made about him. He would watch himself on the monitor and repeat his actions, resulting in a performance that is both natural and aware of the camera. This adds another layer of complexity: the child and his autism are not objects of observation, but present and active participants in the cinematic process.
Beyond the story itself, the film also reflects Haisherik’s path as a filmmaker. “I grew up in a world without cinema, where filmmaking for ultra-Orthodox women was called a ‘presentation’ or an ‘audio-visual show.’ I wrote and directed films without any background in cinema, and it is precisely this distance that has given me a different, unique point of view. My sense of estrangement from the secular world remains to this day, and cinema has become a bridge that allows me to express stories that could not be told within the framework in which I was raised.”
This estrangement becomes one of the film’s central characteristics. The main character moves between the laws of religious practice and an emotional need, between tradition and the possibility of intimacy. The attempt to establish eye contact with the child becomes a small yet charged dramatic action, one that replaces a larger, more conventional form of drama.
Floortime is modest in scale yet expansive in its meanings. It engages with autism, but also with motherhood, identity, and the possibility of connection. The film resonates with literary and cinematic works that center on unresolved female experience, often difficult to fully articulate, within a broader context of motherhood and femininity. In the novel Motherhood by Canadian writer Sheila Heti (2018, Harvill Secker), the protagonist is torn between a desire for motherhood and a growing resistance to it, questioning assumptions about femininity, choice, and obligation. Similarly, in Floortime, motherhood is not presented as a harmonious state, but as a form of internal conflict that is not expressed directly and remains present in small, seemingly ordinary actions. Even when Haisherik chose to remove a direct line such as “I didn’t want the child” from the script, its presence continues to resonate within the film, echoing Heti’s use of open questions and irresolution as a central form of expression.
Another point of intersection between Floortime and literary texts can be found in the trilogy by Rachel Cusk, particularly Outline. There, the narrator is largely defined by listening to others, and the female voice takes shape through indirectness, gaps, and silences. Floortime operates similarly: the mother does not explain herself, and the film does not offer direct psychological interpretation. Instead, it draws the viewer into a sequence of gestures, with the camera lingering on the protagonist’s gaze and on the ultra-Orthodox home in which the story unfolds. Haisherik’s cinematic language, like Cusk’s prose, maintains a gap between experience and the way it is expressed through the mother.
Contemporary cinema approaches autism in a more nuanced way than films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Earlier works, such as Rain Man (directed by Barry Levinson, 1988) and Temple Grandin (directed by Mick Jackson, 2010), addressed autism directly, often portraying the autistic individual as defined by exceptional intelligence or talent, while remaining an outsider who could never fully belong to society. In contrast, contemporary cinema presents autism in its complexity and places it within the family and broader social context.At times, autism becomes part of a wider exploration of challenges in interpersonal and closerelationships. For example, Chloé Zhao’s film The Rider (2018) follows a rodeo rider who struggles to express his emotions in front of his family, among whom is his autistic sister. The film places the communicative challenges associated with autism alongside the broader difficulty many men face in forming emotional connections and sustaining relationships.
In this context, Floortime is part of a broader phenomenon in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cinema, in which autism or atypical forms of communication serve as a basis for examining a female perspective on an isolated and uncommunicative male sphere. While the autistic character and the female character strive to establish a connection, at times through small gestures, glances, or tentative attempts, the male characters are marked by emotional distance, inflexibility, or an inability to sustain dialogue. In many cases, the male character is not a clear antagonist, but one who remains outside the emotional sphere, or fails to enter it.
In Floortime, the mother’s attempt to establish eye contact with her autistic son is not only a struggle with the child, but also with a broader system of norms, rules, and social structures. Some of these are expressed through male characters or through a form of authority that is not visible but clearly felt. The mother is required to cross boundaries, move closer, touch, and transgress, while the male sphere remains static and closed, resistant to change. This dynamic creates a parallel: the autistic child, often perceived as communicatively blocked, becomes a figure who invites a different form of connection, while the men surrounding the mother come to represent forms of social and cultural constraint.
This phenomenon appears in other works as well, where autism is not only a neurological condition but also serves as a metaphor for broader forms of miscommunication. What distinguishes Floortime, however, is that it does not treat autism as a purely symbolic device. Instead, it is grounded in lived, physical, everyday experience. The struggle to establish connection is not abstract but concrete: a gaze, a movement, a presence.
In this way, the film becomes a microcosm of power dynamics, gender, and communication between mother and son, between a woman and the world, and between intimacy and social norms. It suggests that where language fails, the possibility of a new form of dialogue emerges.
