Our Bed Is Green
2021 · 7m · USA
Directed by Maggie Brennan
Genres: animation, LGBTQ+, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In a virtual reality facility called Realm, a lonely young woman named Cecily uses data-mining tech to conjure a digital simulacrum of the person she pines for, blurring the line between unrequited love and curated fantasy.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
This is what happens when sci-fi stops performing spectacle and just... sits with wanting—Brennan's VR premise could've been a gimmick, but instead it's a trap door into longing that actually justifies the technology. Funny how the lowest-fi animation makes the highest-concept grief feel most real.
A formally rigorous treatment of simulation as romantic form, positioned squarely in the lineage of experimental animation that grapples with desire and presence—the hand-drawn texture against the digital conceit is a deliberate formal statement, not accident, and the sound design anchors every frame with compositional intent.
Brennan's decision to animate this herself is the entire film: every line, every color shift, every silence becomes a single author's whisper about what it means to reach for someone who doesn't exist, and that intimacy of control transforms what could be slick concept-work into something heartbreaking and specific.
Reviews
The animation is striking, unlike anything else out there. It's dramatic, bittersweet, and engaging, exactly as Brennan intended.
A colorful, retro-touched animation whose deliberate ambiguity about Cecily's real-life circumstances is exactly what makes it land.
Festivals
- SXSW Film Festival 2021
- Brooklyn Film Festival 2021
- Seattle International Film Festival 2021
- Palm Springs ShortFest 2021
- RiverRun International Film Festival 2021