By Jordan Crucchiola

An Indigenous artist in Oklahoma reviving a family business, a father from Côte d’Ivoire recounting the horrors of war he saw as a child, a man receiving a lifesaving organ transplant facilitated by his virtual reality community of furry companions — these are just a few of stories comprising the 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Documentary Short Film Program, which played at the Library Center Theater on January 25. Each of the projects below serves as a tribute to life itself, as they represent such a broad array of human experiences that underscore for audiences the value of community, honoring memory, and celebrating life in the face of tremendous loss. 

Death Education — Yuxuan Ethan Wu got the idea for his short film, which follows a high school teacher who created a class about dealing with death, when he read an article about the course in 2022. Wu himself is 27 years old and says in the post-premiere Q&A that he and his peers are entering a stage in life when they are beginning to lose loved ones for the first time — and most of them don’t know how to confront it. In Death Education, the director documents the students who are setting out to help bury unnamed ashes on Tomb Sweeping Day, and he uses their journaled reflections on the experience afterward as narration for the short film.

Hold Me Close — Aurora Brachman and LaTajh Simmons-Weaver set out to make a short film about love that echoed their own experience as partners. “As Black Queer women specifically — or people who are assigned female at birth — we exist at the intersection of racism, homophobia, misogyny, and a lot of that becomes internalized,” says Brachman. “And in order to love another Black woman, you have to do a lot of work to love yourself first. We wanted to explore how uniquely powerful it can be to look at someone who knows what it’s like to move through the world the way you do, and how that love can be really transcendent.”

Watching Hold Me Close feels like being an apparition in the room with the couple Simmons-Weaver and Brachman chose to focus on. The camera sits fixed in a space and observes the two while the audience listens to narration by the couple, who are discussing the ways they connect with each other and the world. Simmons-Weaver says they wanted to capture “the most intimate versions of themselves,” and so her and Brachman decided to provide their couple with mics to record themselves totally autonomously for a month. After that time, the directors edited in the conversations that fit best, giving the audience an intimate window into this everyday love story.

Tiger — “My biggest inspiration is my community,” says director Loren Waters. “I believe that Native stories need to be told by Native filmmakers.” The subject of Tiger is Dana Tiger, whose family created the Tiger T-shirt company in the late 1980s, which sold screen-printed clothing featuring artwork by their own family. The company was successful, with the Tigers running a print shop on their property and fulfilling orders for retailers like JCPenney, but everything ground to a halt when Dana’s father and younger brother unexpectedly died within a short period of time.

Dana is now living with Parkinson’s disease, but she is set on revitalizing the family business that was once too painful a memory to carry on with any longer. “The first time that we showed up to film with Dana, very unexpectedly, it was the first day that they were screen-printing T-shirts since 1990, and we had no idea,” says Waters, who received the 2025 Short Film Special Jury Award for Directing. “So, we really knew this was a story that needed to be told.”

Entre le Feu et le Clair de Lune — Dominic Yarabe’s short film is a hybrid work of both documentary and fiction. The central figure is her own father, who is from Côte d’Ivoire and whose village was ravaged by war when he was just a small boy. To flee the conflict, Yarabe’s father hid in a grove of trees for 10 days, at times listening to the screams of his own family members and people he knew in this distance. Entre le Feu et le Clair de Lune is the director’s father recalling those memories and sharing how they are still with him to this day.

In addition to creating an archive of her own family’s story, Yarabe wanted to make a point with her short film about the power of who wields the camera to capture history. “Who has access to the camera is so politicized in today’s day and age and in history. There are so many violent things that happened that can get really buried by the government and just our ways of society,” says Yarabe. “Across Western media and across this political climate, I think it’s more important than ever that we remember there are places across the continent of Africa, across everywhere — shoutout Gaza, free Palestine — that need to have their stories told.”

View From the Floor — Director Mindie Lind knows how to tell her story very well, and she says her directing partner Megan Griffiths is so outstanding at telling other people’s stories that she sees no reason to team up with another filmmaker to share hers. View From the Floor is an animated recounting of Lind’s experiences on Maury Povich’s talk show growing up and how she realized she was the subject of treacly inspiration porn as a girl growing up with a disability. 

“This started out as ‘Let’s see a superstar live-action series featuring an antihero with no legs,’” says Lind. “I don’t want to be a human interest story. I think the whole point is, every single day I am affected by how people are getting disability wrong, and I knew from a really young age that it was my job to be a conduit to the outside world.” Lind adds that View From the Floor was also about confronting her own internalized ableism, and Griffiths cites her own growth in the process as well.

Deadlock — Directors Lucien Beucher and Mahdi Boucif first connected when Beucher got a job making a music video in Algiers. He wanted to collaborate with a local artist while in Algeria, which is how he met Boucif, a photographer who documents life in his country. The pair made work that complemented each other so well that they started talking about making a documentary together, and two friends named Sifou and Mahrez became their subjects; a pair of young men whose brothers had both fled Algeria by boat in search of more opportunity in Europe.  

Mahrez lost contact with his brother, and as Deadlock explores the mindset of those left behind who also dream of bigger possibilities for themselves, it also shines a light on the quiet tragedy of families who still hold out hope for those lost at sea and are living without closure. 

The Reality of Hope — One of the most uplifting works in the entire 2025 Sundance Film Festival is director Joe Hunting’s love letter to friendship and community. Taking place in both virtual reality and real life, The Reality of Hope introduces audiences to Hiyu, who designs environments for the VR furry community Furality. Hiyu, who lives in Stockholm, was diagnosed with kidney failure at age 28, and when he broke the news of his condition to his virtual furry community, a friend who goes by the handle Photographotter volunteered to donate a kidney of his own. 

Shot using recordings within the VR chat interface as well as through conventional setups in Hiyu’s daily life going through dialysis, the film shows Hiyu, Photographotter, and all their Furality friends as they wish to be seen by the world but cannot outside the confines of VR. Hiyu helped create the environments where his friends talk him through his challenges and comfort him when he’s in need, all while Photographotter temporarily relocates to Sweden in preparation for the procedure that will connect them forever.