Sierra Falconer attends the 2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake)” at The Ray Theatre on January 26, 2025, in Park City, UT. (Photo by Robin Marshall/Shutterstock for Sundance Film Festival)
By Shelby Shaw
Writer-director Sierra Falconer takes the stage, with a handful of actors and film team members, on January 26 at The Ray Theatre following the premiere screening of her directorial debut, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake). It happens to have also been her thesis film for UCLA. She explains how the graduate program is four years, but the last two focus solely on making the thesis film, which gave her ample amounts of feedback, prep, and time to write and rewrite her script before shooting at the end of her third year. “We flew most people into Chicago and then drove them up five hours in a van,” she says of the Michigan-based production with a laugh. Since the project was filmed as a series of vignettes, most of the cast members in attendance at the Q&A only met for the first time the day before the premiere. After shooting wrapped and Falconer returned to Los Angeles, the film underwent editing during her final year of her program, only screening in entirety last summer for her graduation.
Humans are mostly made of water. But water connects us in other ways, sometimes subtle, and sometimes the surface is right in our face. In Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), premiering in the U.S. Dramatic Competition, a single body of water is shown to be the peripheral tissue connecting four separate stories happening along four different sections of the lake’s shoreline. Segmented by title cards for each chapter, Sunfish is not unlike a book of short stories, forcing the viewer to catch onto the nuances of storytelling in the visual format: the motifs that repeat, the morals that must be dug up, and the threads of plot that weave throughout.
When it comes to Michigan, Falconer knows what she’s talking about: she explains, in answer to an audience question on the origins of the stories, that the cottages seen in the film belong to her grandparents, and that the Sunfish boat is also in her family. Falconer spent summers here growing up, and she knew she wanted her thesis film to capture the experience of living in this lakeside community. “When I was trying to think of a single story to follow, a single character, it wasn’t really doing it for me,” she says. “So I sort of then stumbled onto the anthology format, which allows a centering of place through multiple different characters around the lake.”
In “Part 1: Sunfish,” a 14-year-old girl named Lu (Maren Heary) is dropped at her grandparents’ lake house while her mother goes off with her new husband for an uncertain period of two (maybe four) weeks. Bored, alone, and not exactly close with her family members, Lu starts teaching herself to sail around the lake with her grandfather’s Sunfish, and his advice for beginners.
“Part 2: Summer Camp” takes us to the prestigious Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, of which Lu’s grandfather had made disdainful remarks. Here, Jun (Jim Kaplan, who was actually a full-time student at Interlochen at the time of production) is dropped off by his overbearing mother, who tells him he’ll become the first chair violin in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by 18. He practices endlessly until chance gets him invited to a game of chicken in the lake with other campers.
When we get to “Part 3: Two Hearted,” we meet a young single mother, Annie (Karsen Liotta). She bartends at a local dive, unhappy with her job. But when she overhears a customer talking about an unbelievably massive fish in the lake, Annie offers to help him try to make the catch. “I admire that you’ve got a goal,” she tells him. “This lake, it’s like a black hole. Once you’re in it, can’t ever get out of it.” Unfortunately, her words take on a darker meaning as they defy the law in pursuit of an adventure.
Closing the loop is “Part 4: Resident Bird”: Robin (Emily Hall) and her younger sister, Blue (Tenley Kellogg), help their dad manage the bed-and-breakfast they operate in their lakeside home. When a family rumored to be from Hollywood arrives as their next lodgers, the small-town girls must exercise patience with their Californian visitors, whose views differ from their own.
Throughout Falconer’s film, we move around a single body of water without really knowing where we are along its shoreline. Only the four chapters and their characters shuttle us from point to point across the water, fueled by snatches of dialogue as ambiguous as the repetitive, lazy days on the lake. Slice-of-life vignettes intersect through brief commonalities, scaffolded by the biggest commonality of all: water.
