In ‘X+Y’, Asa Butterfield stars as an autistic maths prodigy who finds it hard to build relationships with people around him, especially after the death of his father in a car crash.

His mother enrolls him for private lessons with an unconventional professor, who grooms Nathan for the International Mathematics Olympiad.

‘X+Y’ is Morgan Matthews’ first feature film: “The film is loosely based on a documentary that I made eight years ago called Beautiful Young Minds. I took a lot of inspiration from that documentary in making the feature film and particularly inspiring was a young man who featured in that documentary called Daniel Lightwing, who became the foundation for Asa’s character Nathan in ‘X+Y’.”

When researching for the film, Butterfield went to meet Lightwing to get an idea of what it might be like to think in that way.

“Not only did I speak to Daniel but I went to schools which cater for people on the spectrum and spoke to teenagers who are going through similar thi