"My apartment is my universe", writes Matthew in his diary. Mathew is autistic. Highly intelligent and fragile, he spends his days taping telephone calls, hoping that they would help him understand what people ‘really’ mean – "not what they say, but what they mean: they are usually opposite". Spending most of his time in his cluttered apartment, Matthew has established a complex system meant to help him put some order in the chaos around him and walk easier though the hallway of data that he is constantly struggling to organise.

Marc Schmidt creates an affectionate film portrait of his autistic childhood friend – an intensely personal documentary that goes beyond autism, into the inability to translate between one’s understanding of order and another’s sense of chaos, the sense of vulnerability experienced when under the scrutiny of the camera, and the love and human connection needed by each and one of us. A moving story about a man’s attempt to live as close as possible to the border of social acceptability, Matthew’s Laws is also a reminder that housing is a fundamental human right: everyone deserves a place to call ‘home’.

Film screened under the aegis of the European Year of Citizens 2013.