"Furniture & Mattress” is a voyage through an offbeat vision of suburbia wherein two conniving girls – strong-willed Pinky and her docile companion Millie – insinuate themselves into the lives of a pair of boys. Meanwhile, a duo of cat burglars descend upon the neighborhood. What unfolds is a night of farcical shenanigans for all, featuring dress-up, role play, home invasion, theft, games of hide-and-seek, and a dinner party. We present a mosaic in miniature of the ecosystem of one Californian cul-de-sac, where seemingly mundane or chaotic events belie a web of mirroring and causality.

Our film finds much of its inspiration in the diverse communities of Fremont, California and a love for various cinema movements, from the modernist physical comedy of French auteur Jaques Tati to the melancholic "slow" cinema of Taiwanese New Wave masters like Tsai Ming-Liang.

In conveying the narrative movement of our film–where explorations of performance, play, and everyday rhythms in the suburban environment take prominence–we leverage tenets of durational cinema, like the prioritization of imaging space, situation, and setting over spoken dialogue and artificial dramatic elements. We rely primarily on a static camera, wide frames, and deep focus staging to depict the ecology of our community of characters and their environment, and to invite the active participation of the viewer in a search for meaningful gestures and symbolic detail.

For the filmmaking team, “Furniture & Mattress” is foremost a passion project, born out of a love for image making and the creation of uncanny moods and worlds. As such, this is a project with artistic goals before any commercial aim.

“Furniture & Mattress” is very much an “indie” film in that we are operating with complete independence from traditional financing, studio systems, and commercial values. The greatest challenge for the filmmaking team is thus delivering a completed project that achieves a high quality of production despite very limited resources.

We believe that truly independent cinema must remain a viable path for emerging artistic voices. By supporting “Furniture & Mattress”, you are championing a filmmaking ethos that prioritizes independence, experimentation, creativity, and community.

What These Funds Will Support

From the beginning, we have been intent on doing a lot with very little, using a minimal budget and crew to create something much larger in scope and ambition. We are looking for funds for finishing expenses to bring the project to completion and support its submission to film festivals.

These next steps involve hiring a professional sound designer, sound mixer, and colorist. These processes are crucial to building out an immersive film world and achieving a polished final project. We will finally need to create a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) to adhere to film festival screening standards.

Please give whatever you can. This is a very personal project for everyone involved, and our gratitude will be deeply felt for any and all contributions.

Join the Community

Once post-production is complete, we are looking forward to submitting the film to screen at festivals around the San Francisco Bay area, the country, and internationally! Stay in the loop on what's next for "Furniture & Mattress" by following us on Instagram and Facebook!

Are you in the Fremont, California area? Check out our community partner, Citizens for Better Community, whose generous support made this film possible.