NEWPORT BEACH FILM FESTIVAL 2026 REVIEW! Loss is inevitable. In JT Rees’ short film, White Room, we see that, as tragic as death is, there is always a path forward…but no one said that path would be easy.
Reese (Vince Hill-Bedford) is 24, and his life has come to a dead stop. He can’t sleep. He isn’t going anywhere. His parents are fed up with watching him lie motionless while the world moves on. Therapy appears to be Reese’s last chance. There, the conversation keeps circling back to his sister, who died from cancer more than a decade ago. Every time the therapist brings up his sister, Reese insists his condition has nothing to do with her.
Whenever Reese goes home, there she is. His sister Joy (Jordyn Jones) is waiting for him. She asks him point-blank, “Do you hate me because this happened?” Now Reese has to face everything he’s buried since he was a kid: his grief, his resentment over her abandoning him, and the denial he’s refused to acknowledge. Joy isn’t letting him off the hook either. “You can’t give up and die!” she exclaims.
Joy confronts her brother Reese in the family kitchen in White Room.
“Every time the therapist brings up his sister, Reese insists his condition has nothing to do with her.”
When JT Rees was nine years old, his sister, Jessie, passed away from an inoperable brain tumor at age twelve. At the time, he didn’t fully understand what had happened, so he tried to ignore those feelings and cope as best a nine-year-old could.
Personally, I’ve dealt with too much death these last few years, and it’s not even close to being over. Like Reese, I find the easy thing is to try to move on and leave that moment behind. But in White Room, filmmaker JT Rees warns us not to follow the same path he did.
He says that movies were his way of escaping the realities of his life: “Looking back, that wasn’t the healthiest way to cope. Losing a loved one is something, sadly, everyone will experience at some point in their life, be it a family member, a friend, a pet, etc. Making sure you deal with those feelings is incredibly important.”
While watching White Room, I couldn’t help but notice that Rees’ heart was all over the screen. His tale speaks to the full spectrum of life, saying, “I’ve been there, too.” This is the power of film.
White Room screened at the 2026 Newport Beach Film Festival.
"…‘You can’t give up and die!’ she exclaims."
