The cast and crew of “Stranger, Brother.” attend the premiere of Short Film Program 4 at The Egyptian Theater in Park City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Jordan Crucchiola
The filmmakers of the seven works in Short Film Program 4 at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival hail from all over the world, and the subjects they tackle are as diverse as their spots on the globe. But whether it’s a hospice nurse in the U.S., a nomadic family wandering South Africa’s Eastern Cape, or two women squaring off in a Thai boxing ring, each of these films debuting on January 25 says something powerful about a sense of belonging in the world.
In the nonfiction short We Were The Scenery, the audience meets a married couple who were forced to flee to the Philippines during the Vietnam War, and who ended up being cast as extras for Apocalypse Now within a year of their escape. Hoa Thi Le and Hue Nguyen Che were combat refugees now acting in a film about the very war that displaced them, among busloads of other Vietnamese people performing the roles of prisoners, Viet Cong fighters, and screaming victims running from gunfire. From the perspective of We Were The Scenery, we watch the couple as they watch their scenes played out in Apocalypse Now — and see how they are mostly unimpressed with this titanic figure of American cinema. It is a powerful reminder of who the history immortalized in this film actually belongs to.
Producer and screenwriter Cathy Linh Che stands onstage for the post-premiere Q&A with director Christopher Radcliff. Her parents are the ones at the center of the short film. “This is a story I grew up with,” explains Che. “And I wanted to take Vietnamese cinema to a place where it’s not always everybody traumatized and crying. My family, my parents are very funny people who had very difficult lives in the aftermath of the war.” Additionally, Che says it was important to her that We Were The Scenery feature her family’s own home videos to ensure their position as stars of the show, not extras in someone else’s story about their own culture.
Although B(l)ind The Sacrifice writer-director Nakhane could not be in attendance for the premiere of their short film, its story is one that truly embodies the themes of belonging and place. A zealous family that has forsaken civilization now lives nomadically in South Africa, following their patriarch wherever his testimony takes them. His son appears ill-fit for this life, drinking to excess at one point, looking askance at his father’s preachings, and seeming more comfortable in the company of his mother than the other men of the camp. Pulled into a life he would otherwise likely not have chosen, the son must make a brutal choice when his father makes a life-altering decision about his flock.
Setting itself apart from the more somber works in Short Film Program 4, Dylan and Spencer Wardwell’s Sweet Talkin’ Guy is bouncy and comedic. Dylan plays the central role of a woman going on three different dates with three different men. As the audience watches the encounters from her point of view, they listen to the men speak to her in a kind of exquisite corpse monologue, completing each other’s sentences without even knowing it. They’ve never done anything like this before. And going on a date with a trans woman definitely doesn’t make them gay.
Dylan first had the idea for the short film during an uncomfortable interaction at her job. “I bartend, and I was being propositioned for what would have been a weird one-night stand with a patron of the bar, and he was kind of unravelling his discomfort with his attraction to me while also trying to take me home and it was really weird,” says Wardwell, who recruited her brother Spencer to be co-writer and co-director. “I just thought it would be funny as a short film, because I realized I’ve heard that a million times. Also, thank you so much for this!” Sweet Talkin’ Guy sprints to a hilarious kicker, but the comedy of the piece does not undermine its poignancy as a case study in how Dylan and other trans women move through the world.
When it comes to THE LILY (เดอะลิลลี่), writer-director Quintessa Swindell tells the audience how she was dissatisfied with the work she was finding as an actor, and how a growing interest in Muay Thai and mixed martial arts started changing her relationship with her physical self. This led her to writing a story of two young women who were inseparable as children but who turned away from one another after their fathers had a falling out. With a split-screen point of view, the audience sees each woman’s story narrated out, side-by-side.
“My background is in acting, and I felt at some point I was being pigeonholed or stereotyped to be a sexualized character in film,” says Swindell. “I got fed up with that because at some point I was getting really into UFC [Ultimate Fighting Championship] and MMA [mixed martial arts] and Muay Thai, and I just loved what it did for me physically and how it made me feel. So, I just thought about creating a story about two women that fought that was clearly about their friendship.”
In Goodnight, we meet a hospice nurse named Daria (Dagmara Domińczyk) as she tends to a family celebrating the life of a loved one. The story was informed by director and co-writer Isabel Pask and co-writer Annie Fox’s own experiences in caregiving. “We were thinking a lot about paid care and paid intimacy, and we wanted to explore the nuances and the rewards of that sort of relationship,” says Pask. “When she takes the money at the end we really are reminded that care is a transaction a lot of the time, and there are uncomfortable things within that.”
Daria spends her days caring for others in their most vulnerable moments, and Goodnight shows the audience a night in her life where she seeks to be the one cared for in return. Daria hires a babysitter (Fox) to look after her for a night, and as we watch her emotional ups and downs we see a person searching for comfort and connection in a life shaped by anchoring others in the throes of grief.
With Stranger, Brother., writer-director Annelise Hickey presents a tender portrait of family both found and by blood that directly demonstrates the power of finding where you fit. After Adam (Tiaki Teremoana) wakes up following a lively night out, he’s surprised at his home by his younger half-brother Mose (Samson Uili) arriving on his doorstep. With neither of Mose’s parents answering the phone, Adam must assume a caretaking role that doesn’t come naturally, while Mose tries to make himself at home among Adam’s friends and “white people food.” Hickey first conceived of the short when she met up with her own half-brother for the first time in more than 12 years.
And in People & Things, Polish writer-director Damian Kosowski folds together grief and war, combining two of the most potent elements that can reorganize one’s sense of belonging in both physical and existential ways. People & Things takes place in a near-future Ukraine where background news chatter tells us the nation has defeated Russia, and where families now desperately await word on the fate of missing loved ones. Through a translator, Kosowski tells the post-premiere audience that his lead character, Olena, was inspired by his own mother, who lost her husband. At the same time, Kosowski felt like Ukraine began to seem closer to Poland once Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began.
As war remains are salvaged and identified in People & Things, we meet Olena (Oksana Cherkashyna), her daughter Kira (Kira Makidon), and her boyfriend Timur (Stanislav Voitsekhovskyi). Olena is looking for the remains of her husband to confirm his death, and to at last emerge from the purgatory of not knowing his fate. She exists between two worlds, one of her past with the father of her daughter, and one of the present where her country has emerged from war and she has the opportunity to truly start again with a new man who loves her. As Kosowski deftly illustrates, though, even a dark but certain past can feel safer than an uncertain future full of possibility.
