Pimple Patch

Noah Berc

I’m a queer filmmaker, writer, and performer from Burlington, Ontario, and a proud member of the Deninu K??? First Nation under Treaty 8. I tell stories that live in the overlap between horror and humour, shame and spectacle, queerness and craving. I got my start in front of the camera as an actor, working in film, TV, and commercials as a member of ACTRA. That experience taught me how to work on set, which eventually led me to directing. My work now is where an actor’s intuition meets a writer’s sharp tongue and a filmmaker’s obsession with the awkward, the eerie, and the emotionally exposed. I’m deeply drawn to both the unruliness of horror and the formal risk-taking of art house cinema, and I try to pull from both traditions to create something strange, intimate, and unsettling.
Pimple Patch marks my directorial debut, and it’s very much a first film in the best way: personal, scrappy, and proudly rough around the edges. It wears its grindhouse influences on its sleeve — messy, visceral, and stitched together with love. I draw from queer theory, Indigenous storytelling, and the guts of genre filmmaking to create stories that are as provocative as they are hilarious. I’m headed to Queen’s University to pursue an MA in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, where I’ll keep exploring the weird and tender intersections of queerness, horror, and identity on screen. I make work for the freaks, the feelers, and anyone who’s ever had a panic attack in a public washroom.

Director Statement

Pimple Patch was born out of a cocktail of embarrassment, confusion, and a full-blown identity crisis. At the heart of it, it’s about growing up queer and never quite knowing what to do with your body…especially when it starts doing things you didn’t sign up for. As an actor, every pimple feels like proof that your broken, that you can’t fully keep it together, and thats honesty terrifying.
As much as I wanted to experiment with horror special effects, this short is a letter to any gay kid who’s too concerned with how they are: the ones who want so badly to be self-assured, who study coolness and heteronormativity like it’s a script—but still end up panicking, sweating, spiralling to be the right kind of person. There’s also this other angle, about performance…on stage, on camera, and just, in life. As an actor, I’ve spent years learning how to be “natural,” how to sit, stand, talk like I wasn’t trying. But as a gay man, that same kind of performance often becomes about protection. Passing. Figuring out what version of yourself is safest in a room before you even speak. Pimple Patch plays with that space: What happens when the performance cracks and you don’t know where to look? When the script runs out and you feel like a stereotype? When your body tells a story you don’t want it to? This film ended up being messy and honest and weird, and that’s exactly what a film called Pimple Patch needed to be.