The commission
Unfiltered: Life as a Neurodiverse Entrepreneur was commissioned by the University of Strathclyde Business School, in partnership with Strathclyde Inspire and the Neurodiversity and Entrepreneurship Association, with funding from the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council.
The research had produced substantive findings on the experience of neurodiverse entrepreneurs - the structural barriers they face, the ways they think and work differently, and what the business and academic ecosystem frequently gets wrong about them.
The research partners wanted a film that would carry those findings beyond academic journals and into the wider world.
From research to story
Arriving to Plistic with a clear purpose and a specific budget, the first stage of the project was storyboarding - working through how to represent the research in a human-centred documentary format.
Academic findings are structured around evidence and argument. A film is structured around people and moments. We worked out which subjects would illuminate which themes, how the narrative should move across the film, and what shape would allow the ideas to land for an audience encountering them for the first time.
We sourced every subject in the documentary through collective networks. Rather than being given a list of contributors, we identified people whose experiences illuminated the themes of the research, made contact, and conducted pre-screening interviews before any filming began.
This process was paramount because the subject matter was personal, the conversations required trust, and the documentary needed a range of perspectives that together made the research feel fully human.
Accessibility as a production value
Every contributor in this film had accessibility requirements of some kind - which, given the subject matter, was both expected and significant.
Coordinating a production around those requirements was not incidental to the work; it was central to it. Scheduling, location, environment, pacing, and the structure of each filming session were all shaped around what would allow each person to engage on their own terms and present their most authentic self on screen.
A production that is documenting the experience of neurodivergent people needs to embody the values it is describing. We took that seriously throughout.
The result
Unfiltered: Life as a Neurodiverse Entrepreneur deals directly and honestly with the real experiences of neurodiverse entrepreneurs - the isolation, the misunderstanding, the structural disadvantages, and the genuine strengths that neurodivergent thinking brings to the world of building something new.
It does not flinch from any of it and it does not reduce any of its subjects to their diagnosis.
The film was screened in March 2026 and remains available online.
