Brit Phelan doesn’t just write, direct, and act in her films – she lives inside them.

Her work tests emotional truth, blurring the line between performance and experience, using her characters as a vehicle for self-discovery and deeper human connection.

In her 2023 feature, Finding Dad, Brit turns her search for the father she never met into a study of personal identity, casting an actor to play her while she also appears onscreen as herself, experiencing the journey. This creative device allows her to revisit the experience from both inside and outside the frame. She recreates her father’s apartment in her own home, filling the space with fragments of a life she never got to know. The camera places the audience alongside the characters with a reactive intimacy, while animation helps make intangible elements — like memories and unanswered questions— tangible for the viewer.

Her upcoming feature, Something Happened, follows a young woman failed by the system who forms a vigilante group to reclaim her power – a story through which Brit continues her practice of living inside fiction to discover truths she could not otherwise access in her own life. The current and historical restrictions imposed on women by society were her foundation from the earliest stages of conception. While writing the script, Brit worked with a costume designer to develop the lead character’s vigilante costume, using its physical limitations to help shape the character’s movement and the tone of the story. Sound design was also an integral part of the writing process. Brit’s collaboration with composers to build a score rooted in the repetitive percussion of eastern worship, channels urgency and rawness into the characters.

All of Brit’s work shares the same immersive approach. She uses performance, environment, sound, and visual language together to uncover something truthful beneath the surface.