The Colour of My Room

It was a lecture by Simone de Beauvoir, given in Japan in 1966, that offered me the conviction to make this story. “By speaking of our most intimate experiences,” she writes, “Like loneliness, anguish, the death of those we love, we bring each other closer, make the world less dark. This is the irreplaceable and essential task of literature.”

The Colour of My Room is a personal film about friendship, love, and the beauty of life’s small moments – inspired by own childhood memories and my late mum’s writing on chronic illness.

The choice to film on Kodak 16mm came from a desire to evoke the dreamy imagery of remembrance, as the story is told as a memory of the son, many years later. With the Director of Photography, Adam Barnett, we framed the film in ‘open gate’ to leave a personal, handmade quality. The script was brought to life through Alfresco Pictures, a production company run by Golden Globe nominated actor and producer Freddie Highmore.

Elaine Cassidy brought tenderness, subtlety and humour to her performance of Sylvie. We were thrilled that she agreed to play the role. Elaine won the Irish Film and Television Award for her role in Harper’s Island, and was nominated at the British Independent Film Awards for Disco Pigs with Cillian Murphy. But it was her intense roles in films by Atom Egoyan, Alejandro Amenabar and, most recently, in Sebastian Lelio’s The Wonder, with Florence Pugh, which drew me to her work.

The costume design needed to tell a story about these two friends' divergent lifestyles – and we took inspiration from Agnes Varda's Le Bonheur in setting the bright visual palette against the story’s more poignant themes. I'd fallen in love with Cynthia Lawrence John's colourful work on the feature Rye Lane. Having worked at Dazed & Confused magazine back at its founding, Cynthia remains the embodiment of cool. With Anita a fashion stylist in the period, I knew Cynthia would give the character that 2000s authenticity and flare.

Sylvie’s colourful sweaters connect to the title of the film. ‘The Colour of My Room’ borrows from novels like 'Giovanni’s Room', 'Room with a View', or 'A Room of One’s Own', as a metaphor of building one’s own life. The changing colour of Sylvie’s interior life contrast with that of her oldest friend.

So life moves forward, time passes, friendships evolve. For Sylvie, her health has changed irrecoverably before she’s had a moment even to process it.

In this way, the film offers a rare focus on the effects of disability on family and intimate relationships. I hope it stands as a corrective to those on-screen depictions which too often deploy disability as a plot crutch, or a convenient device for the protagonist’s self-actualisation.

The story isn't about overcoming adversity –after all, the film ends on an uncertain note– so much as connection and unspoken intimacy.

The poet Octavio Paz once wrote that we each die and are reborn many times. As Sylvie adjusts to the new realities of her life, it’s this sense of re-birth that sits at the very heart of the film.

Thank you for reading – I hope you enjoy our film.