About

Philip Aceto is an American filmmaker, musician, and composer whose work spans independent cinema and New York City’s downtown music scene.

Philip studied film directing at SUNY Purchase. After graduating, he produced and edited documentaries, commercials, music videos, and non-fiction television.

At the same time, his work as a musician took shape within New York City’s rock revival of the early 2000s. As a co-founder of Blue Sparks, Ahoi, and Apache Beat, he helped define a distinctive downtown guitar sound informed by glam, post-punk, and Krautrock. He remains active as a member of Hiko Men, an art rock ensemble steeped in desert blues and psychedelia. The Porous Gate, his solo debut, is a deeply personal instrumental album shaped by his reverence for classical minimalism, jazz, and 17th-century polyphony.

His first narrative short, At Night, a psycho-sexual thriller inspired by Edward Hopper’s Night Windows, screened at Slamdance, the Milan International Film Festival, and the Rhode Island International Horror Film Festival. Filmmaker Magazine called it “a marvel of precise camera placement, tracking shots and sound design,” describing the film as “starkly beautiful and deeply unsettling.”

His first feature screenplay, The Gloaming, was selected for the Hamptons International Film Festival Screenwriters’ Lab and the IFP Emerging Storytellers Project Forum and was a top-three finalist in the Nantucket Film Festival Showtime Tony Cox Feature Screenplay Competition.

His short film Open House, based on The Gloaming, premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival and was selected by Short of the Week.