Meagan Coyle was chowing down on a carnivorous lunch on an indie film set when she realized she was surrounded by vegetarians.
“I got so weird about it. And I walked away from it thinking, ‘Why did I get so weirdly defensive about that?’” she recalled. “I do feel better when I eat meat, but I am conscious about how much of it I eat. And I try hard to get it to be ethically sourced, but what does that mean?”
As she drove past farms in New York and Connecticut, Coyle fell further down the rabbit hole of thinking about food choice. The director’s philosophizing culminates in her first short film, “Prime,” which is premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
The story follows Claire, who, after the death of her mother, finds solace in an insular farming community led by a maternal figure named Rhea. Claire soon finds that the utopia she’s stumbled into is not all that it seems.
Coyle has been a makeup artist in the New York indie film scene since 2017. She’s always been obsessed with monster makeup and special effects and was on film sets as soon as she graduated from the Make-Up Designory, MUD, in New York City.
After countless times having opinions behind the camera and keeping them to herself, Coyle decided to put her money where her mouth is and prove that she could write and direct her own film. Plus, she joked, she wanted to play God.
Her crew’s dedication to fulfilling her wishes consistently surprised Coyle. She mentioned not liking a sign in the background of a shot, and next thing she knew, production designer Emile Domise had covered it up with hay. Another time, producer Blake Winston Rice bought a generator to deal with a power outage at one of their filming locations without Coyle even having to be aware of the problem.
Coyle said creating a convincing world on a small budget was the biggest challenge in making “Prime.” But her background in indie film makeup, with all the improvisation and stretching a dollar involved, prepared her for the director’s chair.
“Because I’m coming from below the line, I respect people’s departments so much and am so grateful that they decided to haul ass up to upstate New York for five days and make the script happen for very little money,” she said.
“Prime” was filmed at McEnroe Organic Farm, which also catered the lunches. Although the carnivores outnumbered the herbivores on this film set, Coyle spent a lot of time while creating “Prime” thinking about what it means to be a meat eater.
Coyle said she has no trouble buying a chicken breast from the supermarket because it’s packaged and divorced from where it came from. But could she kill, take apart and grill an animal? She wasn’t so sure.
The director recalled a time she ate rabbit stew over polenta at a restaurant in China and was wracked with guilt when she came home to her pet rabbit.
“I sat on the beanbag chair, and my rabbit went right up to my mouth and stuck its head in my mouth and was sniffing. I put it down. Three times it went up to my mouth and smelled it,” she said. “I felt like such a jerk, and I was like, ‘I can never eat rabbit again. This is my friend.’ And he was probably so confused, and he knew.”
Meanwhile, some people who eat meat wouldn’t hesitate to go back for seconds.
“There’s this older guy I know who only eats meat. He doesn’t eat anything green. And it’s like, well, what’s that about? What are your intestines like, sir?” Coyle joked. “You could be in a room with 10 different people who have 10 very different opinions about what they put in their bodies.”
Through “Prime,” Coyle hopes to point out that food choice is a luxury determined by social, economic and geographic factors.
“We live in a country where there are food deserts, where it’s like, ‘You’re getting canned stuff, and you’re going to be happy to get it,’” she said. “I think that it’s important to recognize that it’s expensive in America to eat healthy and to eat organic. … Everyone eats, and everyone has opinions about what they eat, but some people don’t have the luxury to follow through with those opinions.”
While Coyle worries her film could come across as mocking people chasing the latest food fad, her aim is to decrease judgment around personal diets.
“In some countries, they don’t eat cows, and in our country, we eat a lot of cow. And in some countries, they eat dogs, and in some countries, they don’t. Who gets to decide what’s right?” she said. “Anyone who judges people for what they eat should pay attention to themselves.”
“Prime” will premiere as part of the Midnight Short Film Program at 11:55 p.m. on Jan. 25 at The Ray Theatre.
Learn more and reserve tickets at festival.sundance.org.
‘Prime’ in-person screenings
- 11:55 p.m., Jan. 25, The Ray Theatre
- 8:50 p.m., Jan. 26, Megaplex Redstone 3
- 3:30 p.m., Jan. 27, Broadway Centre Cinemas 6
- 12:30 p.m., Jan. 30, Holiday Village Cinemas 1
- 8:50 p.m., Feb. 1, Megaplex Redstone 3