[Pictured: a still from Quintessa Swindell’s “THE LILY (เดอะลิลลี่),” which is playing in Short Film Program 4 at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival]
By Lucy Spicer
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there’s always more we can learn about them as people. We decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!
In case you missed it, on Monday we announced the Short Film Program for the upcoming 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and we’re so excited for the chance to bring this diverse slate of 57 shorts to new audiences both in person and online. It’s no secret that we love short films at Sundance Institute, as they allow us to take in an artist’s voice, style, and unique story even if we’re a bit short on time.
Like the Festival’s feature film lineup, the Short Film Program reflects the multifaceted stories and experiences of artists from around the world. As we continue to uplift storytellers from underrepresented communities, we invite you to learn more about four Black filmmakers whose shorts are screening at the 2025 Festival: Winter Coleman, Nakhane, Dominic Yarabe, and Quintessa Swindell.
Below, hear from the filmmakers themselves as they explain the inspiration behind their short films, which include a story of a dating app experience cut short, the unfolding of a sacrifice ritual among a nomadic family, a hybrid fiction-nonfiction examination of a filmmaker’s father’s history, and a tale of two former friends reuniting for a Muay Thai fight.
Winter Coleman (AN ALMOST SUCCESSFUL DATING APP LOVE STORY): This short is inspired by true and unusual events.
Nakhane (B(l)ind The Sacrifice): I was raised Christian (different denominations until my apostasy), which means the Bible was a central text in my life. When I was in my early 20s (now in an increasingly conservative, right-wing-leaning denomination), I was studying African literature at [University of the Witwatersrand], a university in Johannesburg. My politics were beginning to take a clearer form. At my Bible study we were studying Genesis. The story of God testing Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice his only son stayed with me. I’d known that story since I was a child, but maybe because I was spending my time studying many different texts at school, my attention to it this time was wider and deeper. It was the person who was done-to (Isaac) that interested me. Not the so-called hero, who has committed a trauma no person could get over easily.
Dominic Yarabe (Entre le Feu et le Clair de Lune): I was sitting in the car with my father who is from West Africa, and we were driving back from the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. I asked my Ivorian father about why he loves African American history so much.
He said it is because it is written and documented, despite its horror. In contrast, my father has never seen a photograph of his own father, and he only has one photograph of himself back in Africa. African history is often completely missing. This silence is one that still infiltrates my family. Since then, I have found myself thinking about ideas of resurrection, preservation, and reimagination surrounding lost or unwritten histories.
Quintessa Swindell (THE LILY (เดอะลิลลี่)): Women in MMA/boxing/Muay Thai who are consistently underrated or whose stories don’t hit hard enough on screen.
Films are lasting artistic legacies; what do you want yours to say?
Coleman: I think we have the answers to many questions we ask. It’s a matter of opening your mind to see the truth.
Nakhane: Turn the image upside down, look at it from a different angle, and ask yourself many questions about what we deem traditional and received knowledge.
Yarabe: The more we embrace the complexity, individuality, and specificity of a human experience, the further we are able to move away from cultural stereotype. Tried and true, it is less about what you say and more about how you say it.
Swindell: THAT WOMEN FIGHT BACK.
Describe who you want this film to reach.
Coleman: I want this film to reach people who have left things unsaid and people who wonder.
Nakhane: Human beings. In our little lives we have been the aggressors and the victims. But obviously since the film is in my mother tongue, isiXhosa, and set in a world mostly populated by amaXhosa, it would be lovely for much of that demographic to see the film.
Swindell: I want this film to reach everyone, young women in particular, to provide an interesting and unique story that doesn’t revolve around stereotypical topics that commercial films tend to make these days.
Tell us an anecdote about casting or working with your actors.
Swindell: I fractured my foot during training about a week before we were set to film the fight sequence — watching the fight scene just instantly makes my body tense up; it was incredibly painful fighting on it in addition to actually fighting and being hit. 10/10 would do it again.
Your favorite part of making the film? Memories from the process?
Yarabe: Through making the film, I was able to visit my father’s home village in Bobia, Côte d’Ivoire, for the first time. I met so many relatives for the first time, and I was able to see my father in his element with friends whom he hadn’t seen in years. I also loved watching him get into the directorial aspect of the film as well. He took it very seriously, and he showed up to breakfast each morning with a copy of the call sheet for us to review. I can’t imagine a better father-daughter experience, and I now have boundless images and sounds of my father for our family archive forever.
Swindell: We were lucky enough to attend a family dinner in Thailand and film our lead actress talking [and] eating with her “family” in the film. Thai hospitality is so unreal; Thai people are some of the most friendly people on the planet. Seeing the family and the kids and the joy they all had to participate in the film really warmed my heart. As we started to leave after shooting, they gave us so much fruit and the mom gave me a little blessing. Definitely caught spirit that night.
Why does this story need to be told now?
Coleman: For many of us, death is uncomfortable to talk about and to think about and to deal with. For me, my anxieties surrounding the afterlife are soothed through narrative exploration.
Nakhane: This story has been needing to be told since the myth began circulating the world. Dangerous men have been glorified for heinous acts in the name of God. We’re a quarter into the 21st century and yet it seems we’re battling the same things that have been battled for thousands of years.
Yarabe: Today, Africa’s oral tradition is dying. For years, Africa was considered to be a continent without history because it built its communication on the oral rather than written form. An African proverb tells us, “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.” As an Ivorian American filmmaker, I ask myself what we can do with the burnt ashes of our past.
These days, with rapid technological advancements happening each day, I think it is more important than ever that we hold on to cultural specificity. When we revisit the immense strength of this dying tradition, we are not just reviving what is lost; we are addressing an institutional history of archival silence on our own terms.
Swindell: I feel as though there is such a disparity of female athlete representation in TV/film, and if they are portrayed in sports films today, the film doesn’t quite do the authentic experience justice. Young women need stories told of them that inspire and invigorate rather than belittle, oversexualize, or satisfy a male gaze.
Tell us why and how you got into filmmaking.
Coleman: My love for filmmaking stemmed from my love for storytelling. Photography was my first love, and through that medium I discovered motion and realized I wanted to explore my subjects in more than just photographs.
Nakhane: I grew up renting films at DVD stores. When I was in my late teens, there was an amazing woman who ran a DVD store who would recommend films I would never have seen had I just followed my nose or the noses of my friends. I was also doing drama as a subject at school, so I knew that I would be involved in filmmaking somehow.
Yarabe: At Brown University, I studied Black visual culture within their Ph.D. program in modern culture and media. Therefore, although my practice is visual-based, it is also influenced by my research within the field and the ways in which experimenting with image-making might subvert the colonial gaze. While at Brown, I took a film production class and fell in love with the process. I decided to take a pause from my Ph.D. to pursue an MFA in filmmaking. Since then, I have set out to create work that is made alongside rather than about my communities and I have enjoyed the ways in which hybrid filmmaking calls my participants into the process.
Why is filmmaking important to you? Why is it important to the world?
Coleman: Filmmaking for me is a window into the imagination of other people. It’s kind of a cheat sheet into the world of mind reading. It’s a privilege to see the world from different perspectives.
Nakhane: I recently read that it’s almost impossible to change a person’s point of view with facts, but that stories do. This confirmed something I always thought. I realized that this is why we have been telling stories to each other since we had the brain capacity to do so. But it’s not just about politics or having a fairer world; it’s also about having a good time, about letting ourselves dream, to live in our imaginations, to create.
Yarabe: On an intimate level, it allows me to connect with others in ways that maybe I wouldn’t always be able to experience without the mutual contract of participation that takes place when a camera is present. It brings me into different worlds both in reality and in my head. And why is it important? Well, I think it is important to build as many worlds as possible in order to negate the dangers that come with oversimplification. Cinema is an archival process as well, and I want our archives to be full of specific and developed and alive worlds that are then brought into conversation with other worlds, bringing us to a place of even more richness of thought and cultural participation.
Swindell: Film immortalizes the past, acknowledges the present, and secures a vision for the future.
If you weren’t a filmmaker, what would you be doing?
Coleman: Writing true crime novels.
Nakhane: I’m a multimedia artist, so I also make music, and I’m a writer. And God knows what else I’ll do in the future. Art is where I live.
Swindell: Mechanic.
What is something that all filmmakers should keep in mind in order to become better cinematic storytellers?
Coleman: Watching every single film you can. Reading every single script. And clocking what speaks to you and what moves you.
Swindell: Honesty, authenticity, mistakes
Who are your creative heroes?
Coleman: Cher; Nora Ephron; my dad, Leon Coleman; Spike Lee; Gordon Parks; [David] Fincher; Vince Staples.
Nakhane: Toni Morrison, Zakes Mda, Busi Mhlongo, Ornette Coleman, Joni Mitchell, Wong Kar-wai, Ousmane Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Michael Armitage, Alice Coltrane.
Yarabe: Ousmane Sembène, Mati Diop, Garrett Bradley, Saidiya Hartman, Rungano Nyoni, Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Swindell: Jim Jarmusch, Pina Bausch, Daniel Day-Lewis.
What was the last thing you saw that you wish you made?
Coleman: My Old Ass
Nakhane: The second season of Atlanta.
Yarabe: Janet Planet — wow.
Which of your personal characteristics contributes most to your success as a storyteller?
Coleman: I am a very passionate person, and I am completely in or completely out.
Nakhane: My memory.
Swindell: My tenacity, I never take no for an answer. There’s always gotta be a way.
Tell us about your history with Sundance Institute. When was the first time you engaged with us? Why did you want your film to screen with us?
Coleman: I heard about Sundance years ago when I was in school, thought about applying to labs once when I was invited but wasn’t ready. Now I am.
Nakhane: The first time I was at [the Sundance Film Festival] I was there with a film I was acting in: Inxeba (The Wound). Having my film screening at Sundance is an incredible honor because I truly do believe that that is where careers are started. It’s a formidable festival that all filmmakers I know want to be part of.
Swindell: This past spring, I participated in the Directors Lab alongside Diana Peralta! It was a lovely experience and it was illuminating to be able to work with Sundance and alongside Diana!
Who was the first person you told when you learned you got into the Sundance Film Festival?
Coleman: My cousin Bria. She is my best friend and a filmmaker herself. She’s in London learning a lot of the same things I did at NYU, but she’s paving her own way and I am excited for her to create her own worlds through cinema.
Nakhane: My partner. He was making lunch in the kitchen and I was jumping up and down like a 4-year-old on a sugar rush.
Yarabe: My family! My hands were shaking, and it took me quite some time to send the text. I probably should have just called first.
Swindell: MY PARTNER!!! <3
What’s your favorite film that has come from the Sundance Institute or Festival?
Coleman: Whiplash
Nakhane: The Squid and the Whale
Swindell: Whiplash!
