(L—R) Amandine Thomas, Gerardo Coello Escalante, Daisy Friedman, Glenn Kaino, Alex Heller, Lennert Madou, and Luke Wintour attend the 2025 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Program 1 premiere at the Library Center Theatre in Park City. (Photo by Sam Emenogu for Sundance Film Festival)
By Jordan Crucchiola
“Full disclosure, I’m 21 years old. So, I just finished college two weeks ago,” says Unholy writer-director Daisy Friedman to a round of congratulatory cheers from the crowd, assembled for the premiere of Short Film Program 1 at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. “I’m just so lucky to be on this journey with everyone.”
The programmers behind the Sundance Film Festival’s short film lineup pored over more than 11,000 submissions to settle on fewer than 90 for the final selections — each one representing the breadth of filmmaking possibility displayed in this year’s entire slate of films, and the variety of life experiences embodied within this artistic cohort. The seven filmmakers in attendance for Short Film Program 1 are all making their Sundance Film Festival debut, and a common thread tying these diverse stories together is that each one is intimately representative of the writers and directors that brought them to life.
Friedman’s Unholy originally took shape as a writing sample for one of her college classes, and was born of a desire to see more disabled people in traditionally Jewish spaces. Her protagonist, Noa, attends a Passover Seder for the first time since being put on a feeding tube, and Friedman herself is a multi-organ transplant recipient who used a feeding tube in her childhood. Like her filmmaking peers standing alongside her, Friedman wanted to reflect her experience of the world back to audiences. “Stories of chronic illness contain multitudes,” says Friedman. “It’s funny. It’s hard. It’s not all sad, and we should approach any topic with curiosity and not shy away from things because they’re scary.”
Sweetheart writer-director Luke Wintour made his story of two queer men finding community in an underground gathering house in 1700s London because of “the modernity of the world that we saw” while researching Georgian-era Molly houses. “We were amazed to see that 300 years ago in London there seemed to be a queer community that wasn’t unlike the one we exist in today,” says Wintour. Making Sweetheart reminded him that progress is non-linear — subject to crushing setbacks after periods of advancement — but that marginalized communities can always find joyful community even in the darkest hours. And if there’s one thing he hopes viewers might take from his short film? “Maybe there are more than two genders,” Wintour tells the crowd to a wave of applause.
Meanwhile, UPPER filmmaker Lennert Madou wanted his short film — about two friends amusing themselves while waiting for an asteroid to pass overheard — to evoke desire for genuine connection among young people barraged by constant stimuli. “We are flooded with information every day, and I feel like my generation and future generations are at risk of being numbed by it,” Madou tells the crowd. “In order to evoke genuine emotions anymore, things have to be faster, bigger, better, higher.”
For her film Debaters, writer-director Alex Heller drew from her time as a high school debate judge who, as she explains it, was entirely unqualified for the job of critiquing “incredibly ambitious, cut-throat teenagers, who just felt way more successful than I would ever be.” Heller was inspired by the talented teens she was inexplicably judging the performances of, and she hopes that audiences leave her film with two main takeaways. First, “It’s a peek into a dialogue from people with very different backgrounds trying to navigate a sensitive topic about how things work in this country. I think it’s timely.” And for the second takeaway, Heller wants everyone to realize that “Debate is just fucking cool.”
A still from the short film “Debaters,” written and directed by Alex Heller.
For the writer-director team behind SUSANA, Gerardo Coello Escalante and Amandine Thomas, it all began with a desire to show the effects of gentrification and tourism on Mexico based on their own observations from within the country. “I grew up in Mexico City, and I have seen how the city has changed,” says Escalante. “And it was through our journeys and our travels around Mexico that the inception of SUSANA came from.” Thomas adds, “There’s a lot of younger people that go to Oaxaca. A lot of them go to do ayahuasca or they go to essentially make Mexico the backdrop to their adventure, which is an interesting phenomenon.”
But it was a pair of conspicuous older women traveling together that planted the most specific seed for the character of Susana. Escalante and Thomas observed that these two women were more earnest in their manner than most young tourists they typically witnessed, and when the filmmakers discreetly followed them back to a hotel — with the intention of asking them questions about their trip — the women disappeared into the lobby and the staff had no recollection of any guests matching their description. From that stroke of provenance came the thoughtful, awkward, and humorous story of a woman making the best of a solo vacation in Mexico after her daughter ditched the trip last-minute.
Hoops, Hopes & Dreams director Glenn Kaino was attending a gala for a foundation he supports when he heard one of his eventual interview subjects, Ambassador Andrew Young, tell a story about playing basketball with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to connect with kids during the Civil Rights Movement. The story hit Kaino like a thunderclap. “I dropped my fork. I jumped over all the tables, and I hijacked him at the parking lot and asked him if we could tell this story on film,” says the director. He then called his producing partner Michael Latt, lovingly referred to by Kaino as the group’s “point guard,” who assembled the filmmaking team. The director says he and Latt viewed the project as being about, “not just how this could bring our heroes down to our level, but hopefully creating a pathway for us to rise up to theirs.”
Kaino extended the basketball metaphor to the whole process of making Hoops, saying that he wants people who see the short film to realize “changemaking is a team game,” adding that, “It starts with all of us. It includes all of us, everyone in this room and all the storytellers and everyone in the world. So, let’s go make some change.”
Director Stephen Irwin was not present to discuss his short film A Round of Applause for Death, but it did indeed receive a round of applause in the theater.
