Alec Simmons

A fresh coat of paint signifies a fresh start, But I only feel the walls growing thicker, and the room getting smaller. Shot entirely on VHS, Painted Room is an eerie, esoteric exploration of displacement and memory, told through the quiet rituals of a painter moving into a new home. As he brushes fresh coats onto the walls, strange visitors begin to appear—ghosts not of the dead, but of the displaced. The film interrogates what it means to replace the old with the new. Each layer of paint becomes a scar of those who came before—a visual metaphor for lives overwritten but not erased.

A narrative feature following a queer friend group in the late 80s after one of them is poisoned by a trendy moisturizer. They bake, dazzle, and roll through a nightmarish and increasingly unreal noise-world in search of the answer to, or escape hatch from, postmodernity.

A fresh coat of paint signifies a fresh start, But I only feel the walls growing thicker, and the room getting smaller. Shot entirely on VHS, Painted Room is an eerie, esoteric exploration of displacement and memory, told through the quiet rituals of a painter moving into a new home. As he brushes fresh coats onto the walls, strange visitors begin to appear—ghosts not of the dead, but of the displaced. The film interrogates what it means to replace the old with the new. Each layer of paint becomes a scar of those who came before—a visual metaphor for lives overwritten but not erased.

A narrative feature following a queer friend group in the late 80s after one of them is poisoned by a trendy moisturizer. They bake, dazzle, and roll through a nightmarish and increasingly unreal noise-world in search of the answer to, or escape hatch from, postmodernity.