Sydney (2025 Film) Explained: Autism, Masking, and Survival Through Art

Hi. My name is Jeremy Berkowitz. I made a film called Sydney (2025), and this is probably the closest I can get to explaining why.

Sydney (2025) is a piece about art and autism. It’s about scripting and rehearsing and mental illness and bipolar disorder. It’s also about creativity, support systems, and how all of those things sort of collapse into each other, at least for me.

The autism spectrum is very wide. I usually tell people that if it’s a spectrum, then everyone is technically on it, because there’s no clear beginning or end. That’s how I’ve come to understand it. I don’t see it as a fixed identity, but as something fluid, something that overlaps with everything else in my life and the people around me.

If you looked at me through the lens of the autism spectrum, you might say that my “special interest” is language. Or human behavior. Or movies. Or storytelling. Probably all four, as they really intersect for me.

I’ve always been drawn to the idea that life can be shaped, rewritten, rehearsed.

Here are some things you might learn about me if I was a cast member on Love on the Spectrum:

I don’t like clapping. I don’t like packed audiences. I don’t like certain kinds of noise or pressure or unpredictability. But I do like structure. I like control. I like knowing what comes next. And that’s where art comes in.

When I was making Sydney (2025), I started to realize something I hadn’t fully understood before. The film wasn’t just something I was directing — it was something I was using to better understand myself.

It was a rehearsal.

Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that I was trying to rehearse my own life. Trying to piece together patterns within it. Trying to figure out how to exist within the social patterns I imagined…and the ones I was already in.

One of the characters in the film is a version of me. His name is Jeremy, but he isn’t exactly me. If I’m being honest, he’s a jerk. I see him more as a collage of my worst potential impulses. A collection of masks I never pull out, but might in the worst, most defensive moments. He’s sometimes different versions of myself that I’ve let go of over time.

Because I learned, at some point, that if I could create enough structure…enough performance…enough chaos, I could gain some level of control over the room I was in.

And a lot of this came from watching Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal. That was the first time I really saw the idea laid out clearly: that you could simulate life in order to survive it.

That you could rehearse being a person.

It was something I was doing my whole life…something I still do…something I realized could be harnessed through art.

Sydney (2025) is, on the surface, pretty simple.

Three friends — Jeremy, Kevin, and Sydney — are recording a scripted podcast written by Jeremy. It’s full of references to pop culture and my life. It shifts in tone rapidly. Sometimes it’s filled with laughter and other times it’s filled with tension. Overall, I think it can be seen as a play about a podcast with a short film purposefully positioned in the middle.

But as it goes on, something starts to break.

You realize that all of these characters are performing. Not just for each other, but for themselves. They’re layering identities, putting on masks, trying to maintain control over how they’re seen and how they exist.

And Jeremy (the version of me in the film) is trying to control all of it.

He’s trying to direct people into being specific versions of themselves. Trying to hold everything together through performance.

And when he can’t control others through performance, he tries to use pre-existing structures created by other artists like David Lynch and Jerry Seinfeld to hammer in his points. Better yet, he tries to use their worlds to contain people.

But that kind of control doesn’t last.

Eventually, the ability to sustain all of those layers starts to collapse. The idea of being multiple people at once…of maintaining all those masks…comes undone.

And everything sort of explodes at the end.

I don’t know if that makes sense.

It’s a difficult thing to explain, because it’s not really a plot as much as it is a process. It’s about something breaking down.

People have called the film a slow burn, which I think is fair. But to me, it’s more like a gradual reveal.

Every scene gives you a little more information. Not in a traditional narrative sense, but in a way where the structure itself starts to expose what’s really going on underneath.

Until eventually, everything just crashes down.

The way I saw the film while making it was almost entirely internal.

The set was in my head. I would dream I was in it during the nights between shoots.

I kept thinking of it like The Wizard of Oz, metaphorically. A journey that looks one way on the surface, but is actually about something else entirely underneath.

In that sense, Sydney is Dorothy. Kevin is the Tin Man. And Tina/Tricia/Patricia represent the witches.

There’s even the discussion of a dog named Barney (Toto) that takes up a lot of conversation.

But the comparison isn’t literal. It’s more about the idea of movement — of searching for something, of trying to get somewhere, of trying to understand what “home” even is. And by home, I mean a place that the characters feel safe.

But how could safety be found when Jeremy was the tornado tearing down the walls?

I think what I was really trying to do with Sydney (2025) was take something that feels invisible — masking, anxiety, control, identity — and make it visible through structure…specifically, the structure of podcasting.

I wanted to externalize something internal.

Because for me, art has always been a way of dealing with things that don’t make sense otherwise.

A way of exorcising something out of my system.

A way of surviving.

I don’t really think of the film as something that has a single meaning.

It’s more like a system. Or a reflection. Or maybe just a rehearsal that got recorded.

But at its core, it’s about a person trying to understand how to exist…by building something they can control…because they live in a world that is completely out of their control.

I don’t know if any of this fully explains the film.

But it’s probably the closest I can get right now.

And maybe that’s the point.

You can find the film online on platforms like Amazon Prime, Plex, Tubi (soon), and more to come.