It was five or six years ago when Wasatch County Arts Council President Pat Sweeney ran into the late Robert Redford at the Wasatch County Library. 

Redford looked like he was researching something with a friend, but Sweeney didn’t eavesdrop. She did, however, approach the Oscar-winning actor and director to tell him about the Heber Valley Arts Center planned for 4 acres east of the Utah Valley University Wasatch campus. 

The center is planned to encompass an outdoor amphitheater, indoor theater and rehearsal, community and gallery spaces. The project, which Sweeney estimates will cost $100 million, began in December 2023 with a 50-year lease at a rate of $1 per year between the Arts Council and Heber City. The nonprofit hopes to build the center by the 2034 Winter Olympics.

Redford loved the idea.

“He said, ‘This is exactly what the area needs. This is how we’re going to grow and improve the quality of life in this back area,’” Sweeney recalled. “The man had a vision, and the man’s vision didn’t just encompass film.”

Sweeney’s initial hope for the Heber Valley Arts Center’s indoor theater was to use it as an official screening venue for the Sundance Film Festival, much like The Ray and Yarrow Theatres in Park City.

But when the 42-year-old institution announced in March that it would be packing its bags and moving to Boulder, Colorado, in 2027, the dream of Wasatch County becoming more involved in the festival was crushed.

“We’re still going to have (the theater) because it wasn’t dependent on Sundance, but it’s unfortunate because we knew that it would fill the house for several days,” Sweeney said. 

The loss of a potential screening venue is perhaps the biggest impact the Wasatch County arts scene will feel as a result of the film festival’s departure. 

Sweeney said most of Wasatch County’s arts organizations are in hibernation in January and February, when Sundance takes place, so there won’t be a loss of an audience of wandering festivalgoers. 

While there aren’t any film organizations or nonprofits in Wasatch County, she added she’s hopeful Wasatch and Summit counties can come together to create a new film festival to fill the void left by Sundance. 

She imagines a boutique event taking place over the summer instead of the winter, perhaps in conjunction with the Park City Kimball Arts Festival. If such a film festival were to arise, she would love to offer the Heber Valley Arts Center as a venue to bring the two counties together. 

“It might not draw people from across the country right away, but we could have something of our own and make it our own,” she said.

Sweeney’s desire to bring a local focus back to film festivals in the Wasatch Back was echoed by Alicia Stockman, a Heber City folk Americana singer-songwriter and Wasatch County Arts Council administrative assistant.

Stockman has lived in Wasatch and Summit counties her entire life. Her fond memories of Sundance include volunteering at the Egyptian Theatre to get free tickets in her 20s, experiencing virtual reality for the first time at one of the festival’s art installations and watching KT Tunstall perform at the ASCAP Music Café. 

But she thinks the festival’s local focus has diminished over time.

“It just got really big and unwieldy and became all about brands and sponsorships, and that took away from that art experience, I think,” Stockman said. “Now, it kind of feels like it’s so exclusive, and it’s hard to get into. It’s not as compelling for locals to really be able to participate in it.”

That point was hammered home when Stockman performed at the Chase Sapphire lounge during the 2024 festival.

“For me to get my mom to come and see me play at Sundance, I had to pull strings,” she said. “I knew the caterer, and that’s how we got people in.”

Thankfully, the security recognized Stockman’s mother the next year her daughter performed at the same venue and let her right in.

While Stockman acknowledged the departure of Sundance will have its impacts on the Heber Valley arts scene with the Wasatch Back no longer attracting the same creative minds it used to, she’s also hopeful the valley can forge its own future in the arts. 

“With our population growing as much as it has, I think we’re at this precipice, this opportunity, to really define who we are culturally and artistically,” she said. “We have a knack for making things accessible to families. … That’s something that sets us apart.”

As for Sweeney, she looks forward to the ongoing development of the Heber Valley Arts Center — the panel of community members and elected officials behind the project should land on a concept design for the outdoor amphitheater in the spring — and the role it will play in capturing audiences in Summit, Utah and Salt Lake counties.

But her outlook about the departure of Sundance was a bit more somber.

“Next to the mountains, it is the most beautiful thing in the Wasatch Back,” she said. “I’m sorry to see it go.”

The post As Sundance Film Festival leaves Utah, Wasatch County forges its own future in the arts appeared first on Park Record.

The production of the Singaporean Sundance short film “Fruit (Buah)” may have been cursed.

While filming in a Malaysian jungle, a leech crawled up the leg of a cinematographer wearing baggy cargo pants. The site in the middle of the woods where the crew set up camp had been abandoned since the COVID-19 pandemic. Lead actor Tysha Khan could have sworn she saw the spirit of a woman in her bathroom. When Khan asked a producer to check, she came in, confirmed the suspicions and ran out of the room.

And by complete coincidence, the final take of the film was scene six, shot 66.

“She was so scared,” Khan said about director Jen Nee Lim. “She literally had to go outside and smoke. Her hairs were all standing. She was like, ‘We need to shoot something else so that no one on this film dies.’”

Production ended on scene six, shot 69, with the crew offering a closing prayer in Malay for good measure.

“Fruit (Buah)” may have been cursed for good reason.

The film explores the Pontianak from Malaysian folklore, a female ghost who died during childbirth, who preys on men and pregnant women. But Lim offers a twist on typical depictions of the Pontianak, pitting her as the savior of a pregnant woman denied access to abortion.

“Instead of demonizing her once again, why not (depict her as) a liberator of other women who wants to be free from the societal expectation of what she needs to be?” Lim said. 

Pulling from Malaysian folklore was one reason Lim, who has Chinese heritage, chose to translate the film’s dialogue to Malay, even though she does not speak the language. 

Lim hired someone to translate the film into Malay, but lead actor Tysha Khan, a native speaker, suspected the individual used Google Translate, so she retranslated the script herself. 

“There’s a lot of agency because she let us say how we wanted to be portrayed,” Khan said.

For example, Khan said it would make sense for the film’s setting for the Malay characters to eat on the floor with their hands. But it would also be stereotypical. 

“It’s very exoticized,” she said. “Me and (actor) Wan (Ahmad) were very adamant that when our family in the film has meals, we want it to be set at a table.”

Lim described the Singaporean film scene as “very divided along racial lines,” with the country’s three primary ethnic groups — Chinese, Malay and Indians — making films in their own language and focusing on their own culture. Lim breaks those boundaries with “Fruit (Buah).” 

With the film’s North American premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Lim hoped to start conversations around abortion access across national boundaries, too. 

The film takes place before abortion was legalized in Singapore in 1974. Today, Singapore has a very progressive abortion policy compared to countries like the United States. Abortion is available on request up to six months of pregnancy with full confidentiality.

“America is not the only country that has very harsh abortion laws. And there are still a lot of women out there in the world who are facing this problem,” Lim said. “Even though the story is very specific in terms of the look and the feel from my part of the world, what it’s addressing is actually something that’s very global and universal.”

The impacts of denying abortion to a pregnant woman who does not want to be a mother are best seen in the central character, Siti. Khan described her as quiet and contained, full of fierce determination but stuck in a world that doesn’t allow her to externalize it.

“People deserve to determine their own fate, and people are going to determine their own fate no matter what,” Khan said. “And when you stand in the way of that, it’s very dangerous.”

“Fruit (Buah)” premiered as part of the Short Film Program 2 at 3:15 p.m. on Jan. 24 at The Yarrow Theatre.

Learn more and reserve tickets at festival.sundance.org.

‘Fruit (Buah)’ in-person screenings

• 3 p.m., Jan. 28, Broadway Centre Cinemas 3
• 10:20 a.m., Jan. 29, Megaplex Redstone 3
• 10 a.m., Jan. 30, Holiday Village Cinemas 2

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Norwegian filmmaker Markus Tangre began making puppets at 11, as soon as his grandmother taught him to use a sewing machine. Like Dr. Victor Frankenstein, he felt mad with power as he brought his creatures to life. 

Inspired by the technicalities of Jim Henson, the wonky expressiveness of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network shows, and the muted colors and melancholic feel of Eastern European animations, Tangre has stitched together his first short film, “Ivar,” which premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

“Ivar” is a four-minute monologue by Anne, a grumpy puppet with a furrowed brow and permanent frown, that begins with her noticing her husband Ivar’s rank scent as she lies next to him, trying to fall asleep. That smell leads her to vent everything she hates about Ivar, from his stubby neck to his laugh to his lack of ambition.

The music and sound design by Benjamin Nerheim provide the perfect soundtrack to spiraling hatred. The whistle from a tea kettle represents her anger boiling over before leading into a montage of surreal imagery backed by one long, operatic note.

That montage includes several 2D animations by Steph Hope, including a bald, rubberhose human punching out another in a bar, and a glass of milk shattering and transforming into the form of Anne. 

While a live-action film might use stock footage for this rapid-fire montage of seething imagery, “Ivar” creates its own stock footage to fit within the universe’s aesthetic.

The film has a grainy quality meant to look like an avant-garde 1970s tape dug up from the archives and hammers home the dreary social realism. And while the puppets Tangre sewed in childhood were vibrant and cheery, inspired by “The Muppets,” he’s taken a much different approach to the world of “Ivar.”

“I’m trying to grossify the puppet design a little bit,” he said. “I think it’s cool when they look gross and weird and still are able to have human emotions.”

Tangre’s puppet-making process begins by sculpting the creature out of clay, then making a mold and pouring expanding foam into it. From there comes the addition of details like eyes and hair, a somewhat improvisational process that informs the character far more than pre-planned design sketches do. 

“You learn stuff about the character as you go,” Tangre said. “If you squish the face, and it makes a weird expression, then, it’s like, ‘Oh, he’s a cranky guy.’”

Many puppets in the film appear for only a few seconds: a pig-nosed motorcyclist, Ivar’s friend with a pear-shaped head and a yipping, yarn dog with spindly legs.

Attention to detail is Tangre’s greatest accomplishment with “Ivar.” The sets are intricately designed with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details. A brief shot in a bathroom, for example, reveals a bottle of valium and a Russian nesting doll on the shelves.

Tangre’s philosophy was that “Every scene is important to build the world. If you skip out on a few details, then you don’t really buy it.”

As for Ivar, the viewer only catches a few glimpses of his grotesque form before the climax, from a shot of his felt mouth messily chewing what looks like baby food to a 2D-animated distortion making him look like a cross between a vulture and Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.”

But when the true Ivar is revealed, sitting upright in bed as the crescent moon hits his face, he looks meek and even sweet. This is the crux of the film. Does Anne truly hate her husband, or is she simply experiencing the resentments and annoyances that can arise in long-term relationships? 

Tangre said that’s up for the viewer to decide, but he hopes that he’s accomplished his goals for the film: to combine the techniques of arthouse cinema with a medium often derided as childish, and to tell a human story with very inhuman characters.

Tangre described the atmosphere on set as highly technical. A shot of Anne and Ivar in bed took three hours of takes because of all the actions involved: pulling up a bedsheet, turning off a lamp and making the two puppets smooch. All the while, Tangre and fellow puppeteer David Bjørnstad were crammed nearly on top of each other underneath the bed, holding their hands up in the air and watching the takes on monitors.

But there was also a magical, joyous feeling as crew members’ eyes lit up, watching these cartoonish characters come to life in front of them.

“Once you see the puppets onscreen, you believe them straight away, I guess, because they have such blank faces. Once they look into the camera or look at each other, and they say something, you can put your own real feelings or emotions into it,” Tangre said. “I guess being a puppet makes it a bit more universal.”

“Ivar” premiered as part of the Short Film Program 4 at 9 p.m. on Jan. 25 at The Yarrow Theatre. Learn more and reserve tickets at festival.sundance.org.

‘Ivar’ in-person screenings

• 5:30 p.m., Jan. 26, Megaplex Redstone 3
• 9 p.m., Jan. 31, Broadway Centre Cinemas 6
• 3:15 p.m., Feb. 1, Holiday Village Cinemas 3

Online

• 8 a.m., Jan. 29-11:55 p.m., Feb. 1

The post Sundance short film ‘Ivar’ is a social realist powerhouse of puppetry appeared first on Park Record.

In 2008, during his last year of graduate school at New York University, William D. Caballero pitched a film about his Puerto Rican family to the professor of his documentary production course. His pitch was rejected. She told him no one would want to watch a film about his family.

“I’m usually the type of person who does whatever the teacher wants, but in this case, I was like, ‘No. You don’t know my family well, and if I want to do this project, I will.’ And she gave me a B-plus for the class out of spite,” Caballero recalled.

But it was Caballero who had the last laugh.

That first documentary, “American Dreams Deferred,” was a launchpad to more experimental films weaving animation with live action, often depicting family members as lovingly designed, 3D-printed miniatures. 

The short documentaries “Victor & Isolina,” which animated his grandparents’ bickering about their tumultuous relationship, and “Chilly & Milly,” which explored the difficulties of navigating his father’s diabetes and kidney failure, premiered at the 2017 and 2022 Sundance Film Festivals, respectively. Caballero has returned to the festival for its final year in Park City with his feature documentary, “TheyDream.”

Through “TheyDream,” Caballero and his mother, Milly, use the creative process to navigate grief over the deaths of Caballero’s father, grandparents and dog. 

“TheyDream” is at once a scrapbook and a making-of documentary as viewers watch Caballero and Milly create the film they are watching. Caballero composites home video footage and audio-recorded conversations with a variety of animation techniques, including miniature, hand-drawn 2D and 3D motion capture.

“I’m playing with all of these puzzle pieces of archival footage from throughout my life and rearranging them in a way that transforms them into ‘TheyDream,’ into this really kaleidoscopic project that examines not just my life, but important people who are part of my life as well,” Caballero explained.

He said the easy answer to the question of how long he’s worked on the film is four years, but in reality, it’s closer to his entire life. He’s been documenting his family for 18 years, a practice that he recommends to everyone, not just filmmakers.

“The best thing to do, rather than shoving an entire camera into your family members’ faces or having a huge crew show up … is to say, … ‘I’m just going to press record on my iPhone, put it down. Let’s just talk,’” he said. “Maybe you won’t make art with it, but you’ll have it. … I constantly tell people, ‘If someone matters to you and they mean a lot, get their stories because there’s going to be one day when they’re not around.”

With the conversations Cabellero recorded, he and his mother could use motion capture to embody their deceased loved ones, acting out their mannerisms over the audio and using animation to bring them back to life. 

It was a process that brought up complicated emotions, but Milly was completely on board.

“If she ever had a problem, I could always be like, ‘OK. Cut the camera. Mom, let’s talk. How do you feel?’” Caballero said. “But there was very little of that. I think that we were able to really create something that is very authentic.”

Through “TheyDream,” Caballero wanted to give his mother the same access to creativity that helped him as a child. Learning to play violin in public school was Caballero’s escape from the trailer he grew up in, in his grandmother’s backyard in North Carolina. He called it a gateway drug to animation, dance and other forms of art.

For Caballero, one of the greatest challenges of making “TheyDream” was reigning in his own creativity.

“I storyboard (scenes) really safe at first. And then I’m like, ‘Still not there yet. What if I added this ingredient, that ingredient?’ And so, I add more ingredients to the cake, and then I’m like, ‘I have no idea how I’m going to cook this,’” he joked. 

That was where his talented team of fellow animators came in, always game to try unfamiliar methods or advise Caballero how to bring his ideas to screen.

Caballero wore many hats in the creation of the film, but he was in some ways a character, too. The fact that he’s exposing some of his most vulnerable moments to the world isn’t lost on him, but he was inspired by artists before him, like Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Frida Kahlo, who did the same.

“TheyDream” isn’t quite an exposé of every tidbit of family lore, but it does depict strained relationships and wrenching grief with naked honesty.

“I wanted this to be a film that wasn’t just the promotion of happy, tender-hearted moments with family,” Caballero said. “There are lots of moments in the film that are visceral, that are acidic, that are honest, that are painful. And I think that’s life.”

He added that depicting those difficult moments with honesty creates a greater bridge between viewer and filmmaker. There are “universalities” between people that are realized through film.

“I was born Latino. I was born pretty much in poverty, (with) two disabled parents. … Society, it felt like, had no interest in my story,” he said. “But I fought against that my entire life, to showcase my stories of my family are indicative of the American experience. And if we’re going through this, you’re probably going through this, too.”

“TheyDream” premiered at 2:45 p.m. on Jan. 23 at the Library Center Theatre.

Learn more and reserve tickets at festival.sundance.org.

‘TheyDream’ in-person screenings

• 2:45 p.m., Jan. 23, Library Center Theatre
• 10:20 a.m., Jan. 24, Megaplex Redstone 3
• 12:00 p.m., Jan. 25, Broadway Centre Cinemas 6
• 10:00 a.m., Jan. 29, Holiday Village Cinemas 2
• 3:15 p.m., Jan. 31, The Yarrow Theatre

The post Sundance documentary ‘TheyDream’ animates family lore with bare-faced vulnerability appeared first on Park Record.

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

The post Sundance short film ‘Prime’ satirizes food choice appeared first on Park Record.

The title of Jamie Kiernan O’Brien’s latest short film, “Gender Studies,” which will premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, is a double entendre.

The film takes place in a college feminist literature course as transgender student Maisie studies both the course curriculum and her classmate, Rachel, whom she sees as the pinnacle of femininity.

For O’Brien, a transgender director who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from New York University, the film’s setting and emotions are very much autobiographical. 

“I was in a lot of weird, small literature courses with a lot of other girls,” she explained. “I just always had that one girl in class who, for one reason or another, sometimes I couldn’t explain why, had everything I wanted or attracted the kind of attention that I was envious of.” 

As Maisie pursues the same teaching assistant Rachel has been sleeping with, “Gender Studies” explores how not all gender-affirming experiences — like being disrespected by a man — are positive ones.

“Sex can, especially when you’re younger, be a status symbol as opposed to actually about desire,” O’Brien explained. “These early sexual experiences can be bad or make you feel bad about yourself or make you feel like you’re doing something wrong. But even that in and of itself is femininity because that’s what happens in all the coming of age movies and the books.”

Maisie’s mistakes are spurred on by her misinterpretation of a class reading assignment: “Summer,” Edith Wharton’s 1917 novel about a girl’s sexual awakening.

“Gender Studies” isn’t the first time O’Brien has taken cues from classic literature. The director’s first short film was an adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1982 short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 

In dread-filled journal entries, the story satirizes the dismissive attitudes toward women’s mental health that were prevalent at the time.

Inspired by the idea of wider society oversimplifying women’s mental health issues, O’Brien created an adaptation that explores the boiling down of the transgender experience into a wholly medical one, with gender reassignment surgery as a magical, one-size-fits-all solution.

“The idea of using classic feminist literature to talk about contemporary trans issues, I feel, bridges the gap between cis women and trans women,” she said. “We’re all dealing with all the same shit. It’s just with a slightly different coating around it for trans women.”

O’Brien jumped from surreal horror to comedy with her second short film, “Egg,” which mines laughter from the main character’s insistence that the old man interviewing her for a job is secretly transgender.

In “Gender Studies,” O’Brien rides the line between genres to create audience discomfort. In Maisie’s head, she’s the protagonist of an erotic thriller a la Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher.” But in reality, she’s the naive yet sympathetic victim of an awkward coming-of-age drama.

“I have definitely had these strong moments of feeling on the sidelines of experiences that all my girlfriends are having,” O’Brien said. “It never is fully solved. It just gains new context, and you beat yourself up less about feeling inadequate.”

“Gender Studies” will premiere as part of the Short Film Program 2 at 3:15 p.m. on Jan. 24 at The Yarrow Theatre.

Learn more and reserve tickets at tinyurl.com/cpftm2f2.

‘Gender Studies’ in-person screenings

• 3:15 p.m., Jan. 24, The Yarrow Theatre
• 3 p.m., Jan. 28, Broadway Centre Cinemas 3
• 10:20 a.m., Jan. 29, Megaplex Redstone 3
• 10 a.m., Jan. 30, Holiday Village Cinemas 2

Online

• 8 a.m., Jan. 29-11:55 p.m., Feb. 1

The post Sundance short film ‘Gender Studies’ swims in envy’s depths appeared first on Park Record.

Kate Renshaw-Lewis was on a 30-minute lunch break from her job at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles when she bought a tuna wrap from a grocery store. Plastered on the wrap was a sticker advertising that the meal had been made by hand.

“Whose hand made this? How did it get here?” Renshaw-Lewis remembered thinking. “It felt very ominous and bizarre and absurd, just those separations that have become so normalized.”

The image of that sad tuna wrap, described by Renshaw-Lewis as “sweaty and slanted to the side under a sheet of plastic,” was the impetus for hundreds of hours animating her latest short film, “Busy Bodies,” which is premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. 

The six-minute film explores the secret world of how mass-produced products are made. Whimsical, long-nosed creatures wearing wizard hats endlessly paint rubber gloves red, birth lemons from organic tubes and slice up green fish, all while being monitored by stretching, disembodied arms. 

The tiny factory workers are the latest in a long line of silly little creatures Renshaw-Lewis has designed. She said she likes to design short and squat creatures because she’s “a pretty short and squat person, too.” 

“Wallace and Gromit,” “Gremlins” and “E.T.” — which terrified her as a child — have served as the greatest inspirations in character design.

Unlike “E.T.,” “Busy Bodies” is far from a horror film, but the never-ending act of manufacturing creates an intentionally ominous feel. Renshaw-Lewis was inspired by a video about a newspaper factory shutting down. The transformation of a bustling maternity ward of presses into a silent, barren graveyard sat with Renshaw-Lewis for a long time.

Complementing the unsettling vibe is the score, which was recorded by Renshaw-Lewis, colorist Arius Ziaee and musician Alex Edgeworth at the Vintage Synthesizer Museum. 

“(We) all went for two hours and just played synths non-stop. We didn’t take any breaks. We came out, and we were all delirious from the different sounds,” Renshaw-Lewis recalled.

The score was inspired by the work of pioneers of electronic music: Ursula Bogner, Joe Meek, Raymond Scott and Delia Derbyshire.

The remainder of the music and sound design, consisting of clarinet, harmonium and a variety of Foley sounds, was recorded by Renshaw-Lewis in her bedroom.

That bedroom is also where Renshaw-Lewis drew the film digitally by hand. Then, she printed each of the hundreds of 2-inch-wide frames on sheets using a combination of screen and inkjet printing techniques.

The film’s simple aesthetic of reds, greens and yellows was a result of the limitations of screen printing, which requires separate screens for each color used.

Although “Busy Bodies” is not Renshaw-Lewis’ first short film, it is the first she’s created since college. She graduated with her bachelor’s of fine arts in experimental animation from California Institute of the Arts in 2021. 

Renshaw-Lewis squeezed in the animating between other jobs. She picked factory production as a focus because it reflected, and in some ways justified, the medium of hand-drawn animation. 

“I really wanted to make a film that was deeply connected to that method because it felt like it would make the film stronger, and also, it would make me feel less crazy for picking such a meticulous method,” Renshaw-Lewis said.

The film’s biggest inspiration was Rube Goldberg machines — overcomplicated devices running on a series of chain reactions, made to accomplish simple tasks, often in perpetuity. Through “Busy Bodies,” Renshaw-Lewis posits that the never-ending production and consumption of late-stage capitalism is a Rube Goldberg machine, too.

“Capitalism is made with a goal in mind, which is profit. But that profit does not reach most people who are part of the machine. There’s a very few at the top who make a lot of the profit,” she said. “Below that, it feels like a Rube Goldberg machine, this constant cycle that, in this film and in a lot of what we’re seeing now, self-deteriorates.”

“Busy Bodies” will premiere as part of the Animated Short Film Program at 9 p.m. on Jan. 23 at The Yarrow Theatre.

Learn more and reserve tickets at tinyurl.com/29auyxsj.

‘Busy Bodies’ in-person screenings

• 9 p.m., Jan. 23, The Yarrow Theatre
• 9:40 p.m., Jan. 24, Megaplex Redstone 2
• 11:30 a.m., Jan. 25, Broadway Centre Cinemas 3
• 4 p.m., Jan. 31, Holiday Village Cinemas 2
• 4:40 p.m., Feb. 1, Megaplex Redstone 2

Online

• 8 a.m., Jan. 29-11:55 p.m., Feb. 1

The post Sundance short film ‘Busy Bodies’ makes a Rube Goldberg machine of mass production appeared first on Park Record.

Growing up as a mixed Filipina American in Lake Arrowhead, California, Jill Marie Sachs never felt like she belonged. Visiting the Philippines for the first time at 13 — meeting family members she never knew she had, eating ube birthday cake and singing karaoke — was transformational, giving her confidence she’d sorely missed.

On that trip, her cousins dragged her to the beach in the middle of a rainstorm to tell monster stories from local folklore. Sachs had always been drawn to horror, in no small part to rebel against the conservative norms of her small town. Learning about monsters from a different culture, like the vampiric fetus-eater, manananggál, fascinated her.

This childhood trip, strung between a search for the supernatural and a search for identity, formed the basis of “Taga,” Sach’s latest short film screening at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. 

Sachs explained the title translates to “from” as well as “to stab” in Tagalog, which is a fitting moniker for a horror film about cultural belonging.

“Culture is a funny thing. You don’t know exactly where it lies,” Sachs said. “Does it lie in the language? Does it lie in singing karaoke with your family? Does it lie in eating lumpia and ube? Or is it something deeper? Does it lie in the myths and the stories that existed before the Spanish?”

The film follows Vivi, a third culture Filipina American, who travels to the Philippines with an eco-volunteer group in an attempt to reconnect with her roots. Much of the conflict is created from friction between the eco-volunteer group and the locals they’re trying to help. 

Sachs based the volunteers on some of the people she met while traveling in the Philippines, who were there on some sort of mission  — to change, help or save other people — rather than traveling to appreciate the culture or find themselves. Sometimes, Sachs said, volunteers would become bitter with the locals, blaming them for the problems they’d come to fix.

The eco-volunteers in “Taga” show no respect for the Filipino locals or their customs, which leads to the emergence of the Nangangatok, a door-knocking spirit straight out of folklore. 

“Taga” was filmed in the Cordillera mountain range in the Province of Kalinga in the Philippines. 

The film crew transported the segmented monster costume, as well as a few fake body parts, in five carry-on bags through customs in China. But it was editor Joey Scoma’s hard drives to hold film footage that caught the attention of customs officers — thankfully, they made it through unscathed. 

Arriving in the Philippines, the crew met Ruel Bimuyag, the film’s “fixer” who served as a liaison between the crew and the local communities. Bimuyag and his wife, Irene, assisted with a variety of tasks, such as offering their property as a place to shoot, finding extras and helping to obtain filming permits. 

The biggest challenge in filming was constant rain.

“Our camera crew was at times sliding down the mud trying to rescue the Alexa (camera),” Sachs recalled.

But the troubles with Chinese customs and the endless mud have been well worth it. Sachs has connected with countless people through “Taga” who have been through the same third culture kid experience she has.

At Filipino community screenings, Sachs has been able to identify birds of a feather by a tattoo: three dots inked by the 108-year-old traditional Kalinga tattooist Apo Whang-Od, representing herself and her two apprentices. Sachs has the tattoo on her own arm.

“You just know instantly you have so much of that wandering and questioning and yearning in common when you see that tattoo,” Sachs said. “A lot of people, especially from our Filipino community screenings, have come up to me afterwards and been like, ‘This is me. I’ve done this journey, besides the monster part.’”

“Taga” 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 https://festival.sundance.org/program/film/6932f98db27e9d9437e0e8c7.

‘Taga’ 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

Online

• 8 a.m., Jan. 29-11:55 p.m., Feb. 1

The post Sundance short film ‘Taga’ creates horror from the search for belonging appeared first on Park Record.

“Cabbage Daddy,” filmmaker Grace An’s four-minute rush of colorful, poetic whiplash premiering at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, began with a simple premise: “Why am I so bad at Korean?”

An grew up around English and Korean in Toronto, Canada. Her family spoke “Konglish,” a mix of the languages. 

“I wouldn’t say I’m completely fluent (in Korean), but I can hold conversations,” An said. “There’s a certain nature to the conversations that are a bit more comfortable, and they kind of understand my broken Korean and vice-versa.”

It wasn’t until she was older that An deliberately tried to improve her Korean. The process of learning resulted in funny misinterpretations, and she began making a list of Korean and English homophones. 

When she’d stopped adding to the list, An knew she had the script for her next short film on her hands.

The resulting “Cabbage Daddy” is a chain of vocabulary dominos. The film will show a magpie perched on a branch, add a smoking cigarette to its beak, then jump to a couple holding hands, all while repeating the similar-sounding Korean words for “magpie,” “cigarette” and “together.”

Aided by the sometimes playful, sometimes sincere musical score by Oliver Lewis, the film can jump from a drawing of a hug to a childish depiction of an anus without missing a beat.

Each of the film’s shots was drawn with crayon on paper, then animated with a combination of traditional techniques and digital manipulation via Photoshop.

The medium creates an intentionally juvenile aesthetic meant to capture the feeling of “a confused child trying to grasp onto these very fleeting words,” An explained.

An said that the production of “Cabbage Daddy” took two years, with the animation production lasting eight to nine months. 

The animation was not without sacrifices, particularly of An’s fingers, which were constantly calloused as she spent night after night at her desk drawing.

“I have one picture with my ring finger that’s completely busted,” she said. “My fingers were quite hideous for several months.”

An isn’t sure how many crayons she burned through, but, just like any child, she found that she used only about a quarter of a box’s colors, while the rest went untouched.

She used green the most, which is no surprise seeing that the first thing she animated was a cabbage. The film’s concept and title originated with the Korean words “napa,” a type of cabbage, and “appa,” or daddy.

Although An joked that she doesn’t want to be perpetually known as “cabbage girl,” she certainly gained a greater appreciation for the leafy vegetable in the process of creating her film. 

During voice recordings, Lewis, who was also the film’s sound designer, suggested crunching cabbage leaves in the studio. So, An bought a cabbage, but Lewis didn’t end up using it. With a whole cabbage on her hands, An realized it was gimjang, the season around November and December when Koreans spend time cooking kimchi. 

“I was like, ‘I’m going to be a woman and start making my own kimchi to make my mother proud,’” An recalled. 

An said that her parents are her harshest critics, making them the perfect sounding board when she’s representing Korean culture in film.

One of An’s previous films, “Baek-il,” adapted the myth of Ungnyeo, a bear that quarantined in a cave for 100 days to become a woman. 

“After that came out, I think I felt a bit uneasy being recognized as a Korean animator or filmmaker. I am Korean, but I didn’t really feel like that,” An explained.

It was then that An was determined to create artwork from her perspective as a second-generation immigrant. 

An said her parents loved “Baek-il.” They don’t quite understand “Cabbage Daddy.” More fluent Korean speakers have said that the film doesn’t make sense or that it was made from an English-speaking perspective, she said.

“I kind of grappled with that eventually, and I realized that it doesn’t really matter,” An said. “I just came to terms with the fact that this is my subjective view of the two languages and my personal mistakes.”

That perspective was hammered home by the film’s voice actors, Annette Ubinn Hong Kim and Daniel Heemang Cho. The former is a fluent speaker, while the latter is a second-generation immigrant like An, who was afraid of getting pronunciations wrong. 

As for viewers who don’t speak Korean, the film is a wave of confusion, but An said that confusion is in some ways intentional.

“I’m based in Montreal, and in Quebec, there’s quite charged language politics. Most people are already bilingual here, and then there’s a lot of allophone children who are growing up learning three or more languages,” An said. “Oftentimes, language can be seen as a barrier. But at the same time, approaching the struggles of learning languages can also be a unifier.”

“Cabbage Daddy” will premiere as part of the Animated Short Film Program at 9 p.m. on Jan. 23 at The Yarrow Theatre.

Learn more and reserve tickets at festival.sundance.org/program/film/6932fa3fb27e9da1f5e0edc7.

‘Cabbage Daddy’ in-person screenings

• 9 p.m., Jan. 23, The Yarrow Theatre
• 9:40 a.m., Jan. 24, Megaplex Redstone 2
• 11:30 a.m., Jan. 25, Broadway Centre Cinemas 3
• 4 p.m., Jan. 31, Holiday Village Cinemas 2
• 4:40 p.m., Feb. 1, Megaplex Redstone 2

Online

• 8 a.m., Jan. 29-11:55 p.m., Feb. 1

The post Sundance short film ‘Cabbage Daddy’ gets wonderfully lost in translation appeared first on Park Record.

Growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, filmmaker Gregory Barnes was one of only a few members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his hometown. He lived a 30-minute drive from his ward building. His dad was the ward bishop, while his best friend’s mom was the Relief Society president. That, Barnes said, put him in a “prime position” for gossip.

Hearing outlandish tales of wedding nights gone awry from the Relief Society president while hanging out in his friend’s basement formed the basis for Barnes’ latest film, “Together Forever,” which is screening at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

“Together Forever” was born out of a partnership between Neon and Kodak as part of a 2024 short film contest to promote Sean Baker’s romantic comedy “Anora.” Winners were given funding and mentorship as they shot a brief love story on analog film. 

Barnes’ entry follows a Latter-day Saint couple as they struggle through an unsexy honeymoon night.

“To some degree, your first time is always going to be sloppy, but for Mormons, it’s extreme,” Barnes said. “If you’re lucky, like me, you have someone in your ward getting you ready, letting you know that communication’s important, and don’t do anything you’re not comfortable about.”

But often, he said, the religion’s purity culture leads to a lack of sexual education. 

“When you’re finally getting at it, there’s no point of reference, because it’s all taboo until it’s not,” he said. “By the time you’re doing it, you’re sort of inventing sex. You’re coming together with a person. You’re like, ‘How do we do this? What are the mechanics?’”

“Together Forever” is a bare-faced depiction of that messiness. Barnes calls it a comedy, albeit an incredibly dry one. 

Although he’s left the church, Barnes’ intention isn’t to mock.

“I’m not interested in ‘South Park’ levels of depictions of Mormonism,” he said. “The punchline isn’t ever that they’re Mormon. That’s just the given circumstances. And then I just try to construct something that feels real, with real characters, with real heart, real humanity.”

In many ways, Barnes followed the church blueprint. He served a two-year mission in Salta, Argentina, at 19. He married his college sweetheart. He attended Brigham Young University, where he enrolled in the film program.

At the time, he felt he couldn’t make films about his religion, censored by the expectation to depict and talk about the church only in ways that would be approved of by peers and mentors.

It wasn’t until Barnes pursued his master’s degree in fine arts at New York University that he began to open up creatively about his upbringing. That was in 2018, a few years after he had left the church.

It was there that Barnes made his first film about the church, “The Touch of the Master’s Hand.” The film follows a missionary confessing his pornography addiction. 

The film takes place sometime between 1995 and 2008, when Gordon B. Hinckley was the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The film was inspired by Hinckley’s referring to pornography as a plague and the personal effect that had on Barnes as a teenager.

“Together Forever” also takes place during this era, opening with an excerpt from a 2004 talk by Hinckley, “The Women in Our Lives.”

“I think he’s just got an incredible cadence, and his talks are really amazing,” Barnes said. “When I’m writing scripts, I’ll be like, ‘What’s the themes I’m dealing with?’ And then I’ll go back to General Conference talks and pull language from that.”

The fixation on Hinckley allows Barnes to depict the church culture he was raised in rather than the “new brand” of Latter-Day Saints that has come through a slew of organizational changes. 

“The Touch of the Master’s Hand” premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and won the Short Film Jury Award in the U.S. Fiction category.

Barnes said the film received a warm reception from both current and former church members. He’s more antsy about the response to “Together Forever,” since the content is a little more “out there.”

Despite no longer being a member of the faith, Barnes owns the label of “Mormon” — even if The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not. 

“I feel very grateful that I have this culture to explore and mine. I find the stories there to be very human and tender,” he said.

Barnes attributes his creative mind to singing in the church choir. His love for nature comes from participating in his ward’s Boy Scouts of America troop. And there were times when he attended church that he felt a deep love from his fellow members.

Barnes was initially hesitant to make art about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But now, it’s an “artisanal well,” he said. “I can’t shut it off.”

“Together Forever” will premiere as part of the Short Film Program 2 at 3:15 p.m. on Jan. 24 at The Yarrow Theatre.

Learn more and reserve tickets at festival.sundance.org/program/film/6932fa5c1a5535d5c891aef1.

‘Together Forever’ in-person screenings

• 3:15 p.m., Jan. 24, Yarrow Theatre
• 3 p.m., Jan. 28, Megaplex Redstone 3
• 10:20 a.m., Jan. 29, Megaplex Redstone 3
• 10 a.m., Jan. 30, Holiday Village Cinemas 2

Online

• 8 a.m., Jan. 29-11:55 p.m., Feb. 1

The post ‘Together Forever’ brings Latter-day Saint experience to Sundance appeared first on Park Record.