This was a signature year of short films at Sundance. Four program tracks highlight the incredible spectrum of approaches in this compact format. For The Utah Review’s feature reviews about the remainder of the short film slate, see these links: Animated Short Film Program, Documentary Short Film Program, Midnight Short Film Program and Short Film Program 2.
Short Film Program 1
Dark humor always seems to strike the right notes in the short film format. Sauna Sickness, directed by Malin Barr, hits the mark, when a couple decides to spend a romantic Nee Year’s Eve at a remote cabin in the mountains which is owned by the girlfriend’s mother. Everything is ideal until they discover that they have been locked out of the cabin after having sex in the sauna.
Things go south quickly. The boyfriend is furious and lashes out at the girlfriend. The relationship is poised to collapse. “It also reflects how common these experiences are, yet how underrepresented they remain on screen, especially from a woman’s perspective,” Barr wrote in her director’s statement. “My aim is to explore psychological abuse with subtlety, blending tension with darkly absurd moments to capture the surreal experience of doubting reality.” With solid performances by Adam Lundgren and Thea Sofie Loch Næss, Sauna Sickness completes the expectations in its creative brief.
Winning the Sundance Short Film Jury Award for Animation, Living with a Visionary, directed by Stephen Neary, is just as emotionally profound as Ninety Five Senses, an animated film from Jared and Jerusha Hess, which was nominated in 2024 for the Academy Award for best short film.
Narrated by actor James Cromwell, the film was inspired by a long letter published in 2021 in The New Yorker by John Mathias, an English professor at the University of Notre Dame, after his wife died from a long illness and unique medical conditions that started after she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The letter also chronicled his own startling experiences, which included being committed to a psychiatric hospital ward, all of which coincided with the pandemic. Mathias wrote eloquently about Diana, who worked for many years as an art curator, and how her medications caused her to experience vivid hallucinations and how COVID-19 separated them and their final words came not in person, but by phone.
Neary, who has worked as a story artist for many years, explained in his director’s statement how Mathias’ story resonated immediately with him. “It’s impossible not to draw parallels to your own life–the decline of my grandmother due to dementia years prior, my parents aging as my own family grows, the feelings of powerlessness, all alongside a strange sense of beauty in the absurd,” he wrote. “I reached out to Matthias in 2022 about adapting the article into an animated short film, visually inspired by the work of Canadian animator Frédéric Back. I understood that no major studio would support it, but I felt deeply touched by my conversations with John, who told me, ‘I think it’s something Diana would have liked.’”
By hand, Neary rendered the thousands of drawings on overlapping layers of vellum and watercolor paper, adding that he loved “building up translucent layers to mimic depth-of-field, approaching each unique shot like a paper puzzle to be solved, scanning every scene one frame at a time.”
Pankaja, which was written, directed and produced by Anooya Swamy, is about a woman and her daughter who are walking the slum neighborhoods in Bangalore and visiting government offices in hopes of finding her husband’s whereabouts. The film was inspired by Swamy’s observations as a younger woman. “The many men I grew up around were constantly in occupations of illegal or informal work; many who leave home for work and rarely return, which had me question how you can report a missing person who is doing something illegal. What are the moralities of a man who does an honest man’s work in an illegal setting? Can a woman and her daughter survive the journey of finding the truth in a system that is designed to work against people like her?” Swamy wrote in her director’s statement.
The viewer will readily pick up the realities captured in the narrative. There must be significant discrepancies in the numbers of undocumented workers who end up missing, according to families. The ironic ridiculousness and ineffectiveness of bureaucracy is acute and stinging. Despite formidable challenges, women take command as resilient leaders of their families, for the sake of their children.
Candy Bar, a six-minute short from Australia and directed by Nash Edgerton, is devilishly funny and well acted. In line for concessions at a movie theater, a girl tells a man that he reminds her of her deceased father. And, after she orders her movie snack, she turns to him and asks if he wouldn’t mind being called ‘dad’ and to hug her. He is so touched that he has tears in his eyes. When his girlfriend returns from the restroom and the couple step up to the counter to buy popcorn and a candy bar, he is shocked to discover that the girl had left him to pay for the concessions. Hilarity ensues.
As her documentaries are always capable of capturing warm-hearted audience responses and awards, Cristina Costantini returned to Sundance this year with her fourth film, this one being a short, La Tierra del Valor (The Home of the Brave).
At 22 minutes, it has all of the distinctive emotional punch that her three previous Sundance films have carried: Science Fair (2018 Sundance Festival Favorite Award), Mucho Mucho Amor (2020 Sundance) and SALLY (Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, 2025 Sundance).
Bravery is the undercurrent of many great documentaries and the story of rising pop singer and dancer Nezza (Vanessa Hernandez), who is based in Los Angeles, meets the standard. This short would be the perfect companion to David Alvarado’s American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, the documentary which topped all of this year’s features to win the Festival Favorite Award at Sundance.
The daughter of immigrants from Colombia and Dominican Republic, Nezza made international headlines on June 14, 2025 when she sang the U.S. national anthem in Spanish at Dodger Stadium. At that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were raiding immigrant communities, prompting huge protests from angry Angelenos as well as in other parts of the country.
Nezza’s story is a quintessential account of immigrants striving to achieve their own version of the American Dream: hardworking parents who also enjoyed salsa dancing and who supported their daughter’s creative vision of becoming a performer, dancer and choreographer. The family’s DIY work ethic is illuminated throughout the film.
Nezza was thrilled when she was invited to sing the anthem on the same day a military parade was occurring in Washington, D.C. while millions around the country had organized the No Kings protests. While she did not consider herself in taking on a public role as an activist, she saw an opportunity to make a statement. The Dodgers organization had not issued any sort of statement to support the Latino community, especially as large numbers of Latinos were proud fans of the team.
Ahead of the event, she had informed the organization that she would be performing the official Spanish language version of the anthem, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned: El Pendón Estrellado, written in 1945 by Peruvian-American composer Clotilde Arias. When she arrived at the stadium, she was told to perform the anthem as it was originally written, without any further discussion.
The film includes footage of her singing the Spanish language version, which was captured by Keean Johnson, her boyfriend who is an actor and plans to pursue a career in documentary film and directing. The performance sparked the predictable debate but it became a lightning rod that has empowered Nezza and electrified her blossoming career.
When asked by a Los Angeles Times reporter about her decision to perform the version of the anthem she intended originally, Nezza said, “I understand why people are scared to speak up… I was [once] one of those people. But I mean, during [the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests], I was out in the streets.” She added, “I’ve been very vocal on my online platforms for a while. It’s very clear where I stand politically. All that matters is to speak your truth. I think last year really taught me that the Latino community is ready to welcome you with open arms, so I’m ready to continue on with that activism.”
In that same interview, Costantini expanded upon the theme of bravery that moves this film along. “Being brave sometimes feels scary, and it’s not [for] some other class of person. These are normal people like us that are the ones standing up right now: It’s the nurses protecting their patients, the teachers protecting their kids,” she explained. “These are the normal people resisting authoritarianism. We’re going to be in a position [to stand up] at some point, and what are we going to do? I hope that I choose the Nezza path.”
Short Film Program 3
There is a generous helping of fearless filmmaking in this short film collection.
Directed by Riley Donigan, Stairs packs a wallop as a psychological horror story. Betsey Brown is breathtaking as Ally, a woman who has everything going for her, including a great job and her fiancé. After an accidental spill on some stairs, Ally feels strangely aroused by the experience. First, she Googles videos showing people who fell down stairs and eventually she deliberately takes spills.Each time, the risks of serious injury are more dangerous, as she goes deeper into this bizarre addiction. Initially, a work colleague assumes that her bruises and contusions might be signs of domestic violence. The premise is shocking but admittedly the viewer would find it hard to divert their eyes from such gruesome scenes.
After winning the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, Without Kelly (Utan Kelly) by writer-director Lovisa Sirén, is yet another chapter about motherhood and intimacy in the filmmaker’s work as she has been inspired by her own experiences as a parent.
The film is about a mother experiencing separation anxiety, as she leaves her baby daughter with the father for the first time. While the maternal instincts are central to her life, she still yearns to be reassured by her own needs of intimate connections. This is Sirén’s second short film to premiere at Sundance.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Sirén talked about how her experiences as a mother shaped the story she developed for the film. She has three children: 18, 10 and a newborn. She also talked to friends who talked about the intense anxieties and restlessness they have experienced whenever they were separated from their young children. In the film, the aspect of breastfeeding is incorporated in a novel approach that emphasizes the intimacy surrounding that experience.
It is evident to comprehend how Tawfeek Barhom’s I’m Glad You’re Dead Now won the Short Film Palme D’Or when it premiered last summer at Cannes. Beautifully shot and with a minimum of dialogue, Barhom and his real-life brother (Ashraf Barhom) deliver moving performances. After their father’s death, the two brothers return to the island that was their home and talk through their difficult family history. What makes the conversation more tense and complicated is that the older brother has signs of dementia.
Alexandra Kern’s Some Kind of Refuge is an edifying documentary short about the ecological significance of the batture, the remaining portions of the Mississippi River active floodplain, which refers to the land and waters between the federal levees. Kern highlights two residents in New Orleans who continue to live on the batture, which continues to shift as climate change patterns will heighten the risks of catastrophic flooding.
Raman Nimmala’s O’Sey Balamma gives viewers a simple story set against a cultural tradition unique to India and Nepal: the mid-winter Sankranti harvest festival which celebrates the Sun’s transition from Sagittarius to Capricorn. Awaiting the arrival of her son, the mother insists that everything is perfect and ready, a challenge assisted by her loyal housekeeper.
Faux Bijoux, directed by Jessy Moussallem, is an exceptionally polished short that wraps together effectively the dehumanizing transactional nature of exploitation and the surrounding implications of ethnic racism, economic inequalities and the power dynamics of gender.
A woman tells her family that she is on the verge of landing a major acting job and takes her son along to an audition, telling him that he might also be able to land a role. In reality, as she is guided by an ‘agent,’ she is negotiating the opportunity to become a surrogate mother for a couple who are unable to have children. The dynamics become more tense when the couple offers more money if she agrees to carry twins.
Short Film Program 4
Winning the Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction, Lily Platt’s Crisis Actor is tight but also abundant in epiphanies. Celine is addicted to performing and after she is fired from her job as a medical actor, she barely misses a beat to find other outlets. In a chance encounter with Josh, she follows him into an Al-Anon meeting where he talks about Emily, his alcoholic sister. Later in his apartment, Celine is enjoying her latest performance but when Emily, who has relapsed into her addiction, shows up, a confrontation triggers a crisis that jolts Celine into a blunt realization about her addiction to being the constant performer.
Interviewed by The Utah Review, Platt said the film is part of her second year in the film graduate program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She explained that Celine is an extension of a character she created for a previous short film as a student, about a woman who lies about a pregnancy and planned abortion to manipulate her ex-boyfriend. “I loved that character and I wanted to continue my work with her,” she said.
Working as a medical actor, the character of Celine, according to Platt, “valorizes tragic circumstances and sees a lot of dramatic values as a performer in suffering and disease and medical spaces and for actors it is an appealing job because you can lean into those portrayals of diseases and illnesses.” However, Celine is fired from her gig after she goes beyond the scope of what is appropriate behavior and what is useful for training doctors.
In setting up the prompt for Celine’s wake-up call, Platt envisioned the confrontation in Josh’s apartment with Emily, the sister who shows up drunk and becomes frighteningly aggressive. “For this person [Celine], who has this erratic pattern of behavior, she tolerates a lot and can handle a lot but what’s the scenario that’s not tolerable for her anymore,” she explained.
The acting is outstanding throughout the cast. Sarah Steele and Philip Ettinger shine, respectively in the leads as Celine and Josh. Platt said it was serendipitous that both had worked together previously. Celine struggles with managing the boundary between the professional and personal, as a performer. “An existential question that I imagine a lot of performers think about is what is the line between performance and real life, especially for skilled performers who enjoy the process,” Platt explained. “It is always fun to read about actors who go all in like that and are more method and really commit to roles in certain ways.” She added that this guided her to “think about writing a character who is an actor and how she approaches her sense of performing constantly and that’s part of her work ethic as a performer because she uses everything as an opportunity to have an audience, even if the audience is just herself.”
Kudos also go to the editor Rosanne Wilke. This was the first time Platt worked with an editor other than herself. Platt did the first cut, which was 20 minutes, and passed it off to Wilke. The film was whittled down to 10 minutes at one point and then finally came in at 13 minutes. The experience of working with an editor other than herself was “most gratifying,” she added.
Hannah Schierbeek’s Radiant Frost is an atmospheric zeitgeist piece filmed in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as a drifter encounters a woman who has broken free from a survivalist cult. It segues smoothly into How Brief by Kelly McCormack, where the main character’s disappearance becomes a liberating act. The film’s aesthetic style transports us to the early 1960s, with 16mm film, hand-dyed costumes, monochromatic sets and palettes that match in color. A woman, who has never reconciled nor healed from the memories of her mother who abandoned her and her brother, she goes to the childhood home for dinner, where her brother and his pregnant wife live. She feels utterly invisible.
McCormack was inspired by the story of Connie Converse, a singer-songwriter who was, in a sense, a rising musical star during the 1950s. However, as few seemed to notice or care about her songs, she focused on social justice work but then disappeared entirely in 1974. She wrote a few letters suggesting that she was going to build a new life but urged everyone not to look for her. She was never heard from again and neither her body nor her car were found. However, Converse’s story and music have been revived. This includes Howard Fishman’s biography, To Anyone Who Ever Asks: The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse. Also, an album (Musicks) of previously unreleased songs came out in 2023, which Converse recorded at home in 1956. As McCormack noted in her director’s statement, “The question that propelled this work was not why a woman would choose to disappear, but rather, why wouldn’t she? I wanted to capture all the terror and the glory that comes with accepting this fact.”
A poetic hand-painted animation short, Once in A Body by María Cristina Pérez González, is more environmental than narrative, as one sister hopes to reconcile with another over an incident during their younger years. The opening poetic verse leaves open the interpretation to the viewer: There was a body that didn’t want to be human. It didn’t know it belonged to someone. To me.”
Lisa Malloy and Ray Whitaker’s The Creature of Darkness takes place at nighttime in Little Egypt, where a trio of children listen to a story by their uncle, while they gather in a cave that was a hiding location for freedom seekers during the days of the Underground Railroad.
Running just four minutes, Ivar, a live action puppetry animation made by Oslo director and puppeteer Markus Tangre, was a bona fide audience pleaser. Infused with a dark comedic vibe, the woman is irritated and frustrated by her husband’s snoring but, more so by his odor. As she contemplates whether or not she should leave him, she faces the camera, as a rapid-fire list of images and montages pass by which document everything she sees wrong in him.
Gabriela Ortega set Marga en el DF in 1995, just after the murder of Selena, the young queen of Tejano music. Marga, who is well into her pregnancy and lives in the Dominican Republic, decides to surprise her husband who is living in Mexico City. Grief over Selena’s death is palpable which deepens Marga’s stunning realization that she is now in the challenges of reinventing herself and her life. The observational approach effectively conveys Marga’s state of mind and her emerging resolve to muster the bravery for making life on her terms. This is Ortega’s second short film to premiere at Sundance.
Short Film Program 5
Capping a trilogy which also brought the first two short films to their respective Sundance premieres in 2024 and 2025, Albatross directed by Amandine Thomas and Gerardo Coello Escalante extended an absorbing narrative examination of the relationship dynamics between Mexico and the U.S. through ordinary scenes and events. The trilogy was called Expectations and the counterpoints work particularly well, given that Thomas was born in the U.S. while Escalante came from Mexico.
Premiering in 2024, Viaje de Negocios was about a boy who learns a terrible secret from wearing new shoes to school that his father bought him from San Antonio. In 2025, Susana was about an American tourist traveling in Mexico City who meets fellow Americans. In Albatross, set in a Virginia suburb, a Mexican woman who cares for her husband as he becomes physically weaker and his cognitive skills are deteriorating is debating whether or not she should go to a party celebrating Mexican Independence Day. The thematic arc is the same in all three narratives: the main character’s attempts to realize their expectations eventually go unfilled, but their experiences also open up a new path.
The finely acted Don’t Tell Mama is an excellent short narrative debut for Chloe Leigh King, a New York City writer, director, and actor. Chloe, 16, is the light-skinned Black daughter whose parents are divorced. Her father is Vasco, a Montenegrin immigrant, who picks up his daughter at her mother’s home in Manhattan’s upper east side, for their bi-weekly dinner. Vasco is definitely struggling. His appearance is anything but neat and is banned from entering the building where Chloe and her mother live. Also, Vasco is not happy with the way his daughter is dressed, which makes a tense evening that much more so. Distraught that he is resigned to attempt rebuilding a shattered life, he envies the fact that his daughter is just beginning the identity-defining experiences as she approaches adulthood. During dinner, Vasco reveals a shocking story about her mother’s past, which changes Chloe’s worldview before the night is over.
Just as compelling a coming-of-age narrative but with a different perspective, Birdie, directed by Praise Odigie Paige, takes us back to the 1970s after the Nigerian Civil War (Biafra War). English, 16, and her family are refugees now living in a Catholic charity home in rural Virginia. But when a new Nigerian refugee arrives, a gap develops in the relationship between English and her sister, Birdie.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Paige, who was born in Nigeria, said that she did not set out to write a migration story, especially about refugees from the Biafra War. She spoke about her own migration experiences as a young Nigerian and the “cultural alienation” and “macro sense of strangeness.” It was that connection which inspired Paige to frame the landscape visuals of the film. Instead of living amid the hustle and bustle of a major city, many families often ended up in rural and remote places that could be, as Paige described, “very unwelcoming places.”
Paige had relatable experiences as English discovers in the film. “It really hit home for me,” she said, adding that back home her favorite aunts and her grandmother died and because they had yet to establish residency in the U.S. they could not afford to return to Nigeria and grieve about lost loved ones. Paige and her family also moved frequently. When kids must leave their homeland immediately during times of violence, they don’t have the space or guidance to process their trauma much less how to survive and assimilate in an entirely new community. The landscape and river in Birdie are prominent metaphors as English walks precisely to see if she can find the edges of a place that seems to extend without an end. Birdie stands out for directing the viewer to see the casualty perspective of war’s displacement from the eyes of girls and women like English and her sister.
A witty palate cleanser, Balloon Animals, directed by Anna Baumgarten, has a novel premise between a customer and two supermarket employees. Arriving just before the store is set to close, a customer wants a balloon bouquet for her brother’s surprise birthday party. But when the employees learn that the balloons and the surprise are part of a ritual that the customer’s family has done every year since the brother died, the employees help out the woman. With helium gas and cake, the trio enjoy quite a few laughs, as the store’s closing time approaches?
Directed by Will Niava, Jazz Infernal won the Sundance Short Film Jury Award for International Fiction for a boffo narrative treatment. The son of a legendary trumpet player from the Ivory Coast, Koffi has just landed in Montréal, with plans to stay with a family relative and hopes that he can make it as a musician. His first night in Canada turns out to be a wild ride, after he meets two rambunctious men who work in a jazz club and restaurant. The outcome of that crazy night finally gives him the courage and voice to pursue his dreams.
Shot in Havana as part of a project for her master’s degree in film at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Norheimsund, directed by Ana A. Alpizar, offers yet another take on the sting of unfilled dreams and how expectations turn sour. A young woman has kept up a long-distance romance with an older Norwegian man, in hopes that he will help her and her mother escape the extreme poverty of life in Cuba. However, discovering the truth, the young woman realizes that the promises were empty.
“Since I was a child, I grew up hearing stories about sixty-year-old Europeans who, essentially, bought exotic Cuban brides with the promise of a better life,” Alpizar wrote in her director’s statement. “These women were the Cinderellas of post-Soviet Cuba, seen as heroines not only for having escaped the island’s agonizing reality, but also for their potential to become providers for their families from abroad. Unfortunately, those stories aren’t just distant memories; they still reflect the painful everyday reality of thousands of Cuban women today. Norheimsund had its international premiere at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival as part of the Orizzonti Short Films official selection, and its U.S. premiere at Sundance.
With fabulous acting by Justin H. Min and Michael Hsu Rosen, Callback, directed by Matthew Puccini, is a first-rate dark comedy. Coming home from a day of drudgery working at a restaurant, Max learns that WIll, his boyfriend, has landed a callback for a prime role with which Max also is familiar. Max’s insincere tone cannot mask the envy he has for Will’s success, especially because Will can afford not to work. When the couple corral a teenager who is going door to door selling fundraising tickets to judge which one is a better actor, the tension erupts into a five-alarm relationship conflagration.