By Jordan Crucchiola

The 2025 Sundance Film Festival’s Short Film Program 2, which premiered on January 24 at the Egyptian Theatre, is filled with superlatives, with three films receiving jury prizes. On display in the program’s eight projects is stunning animation, tender stories of familial love, surprising comedy, and even erotic provocation. Many filmmaking careers have been launched from shorts that screened at the Festival, and the entries in Short Film Program 2 undoubtedly offer us a sneak peek at the next wave of great artists.

Azi — The story of Azi was inspired by an experience in the filmmaker’s own life when she was a senior in high school. “I really wanted to make a movie about power and power dynamics,” writer-director Montana Mann tells the crowd during the post-premiere Q&A. “When you’re 17, if someone doesn’t put up a boundary with you, how far would you push that boundary?” In the short film, Mann’s main character, Azi (Dior Negeen Goodjohn), goes off for a weekend away with her best friend, her best friend’s dad, and the dad’s girlfriend. As soon as the girlfriend, whom Azi’s best friend resents, gets in the car, Azi starts stealing glances in her direction. As the trip goes on, the older woman and the teenage girl begin to challenge each other in an exchange of manipulations, putting viewers in the uncomfortable role of voyeur as the dynamic plays out. 

The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing — Director and editor Theo Panagopoulos is working toward his Ph.D. in Scotland, and during the course of his research he discovered archival footage from the 1930s and 1940s of flowers in Palestine when the country was under British occupation. The footage, captured by a Scottish missionary, shows the serene, natural beauty of this disputed land. It had never been shared widely before the filmmaker found it. “Being Palestinian, I felt this was the beginning of a process of looking at the material and then reclaiming the material,” says Panagopoulos, who has digitized the footage for preservation. The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing is the winner of the Festival’s Short Film Grand Jury Prize. 

Out for Delivery — This short film from writer-director Chelsea Christer is one of the Festival’s best examples of finding tenderness amid something so bleak. In Out for Delivery, a woman named Joanna (Deanna Rooney) learns that she has come to the end of the line for treatment options with her terminal diagnosis, but her providers do offer her the chance to facilitate dignified end-of-life solutions. Joanna can choose to end her life with a medication that gets shipped to her house. She elects to do so, and schedules an appointment for her body to be picked up from her home shortly after she’s consumed the prescription. But “death with dignity” is far simpler in name than in execution for poor Joanna, who ends up in a comedy of errors thanks to a mix-up with the mail. 

“This was loosely inspired by true events, unfortunately,” Christer explains to the audience. “I was told about someone who pursued end-of-life options and the shipping company lost the package completely. It was the most tragic thing I’d ever heard, and I chuckled when I first heard it. So, I explored those feelings of this deep frustration I have with systems in place that aren’t really providing us any dignity.” Martin Starr also appears as a perfectly cast corpse retrieval specialist.

The Eating of an Orange — Watching The Eating of an Orange is a colorful, sensual experience in animation that both literally reflects its title and goes so far beyond that into a realm of metaphor as it centers on a woman who lives in a life of strict conformity, but who is transported to another world when she takes a bite of a forbidden orange. May Kindred-Boothby is the writer-director and animator of the short film, which won the Festival’s Short Film Special Jury Award for Animation Directing, and she spent about four months hand drawing for 14 hours a day, every day, to complete the project. 

The labor shows in the vibrancy and detail of Kindred-Boothby’s final piece. On the origins of her short film’s creation, the filmmaker tells the premiere crowd that she was “reading a lot of queer theory at the time [I was making it], and also a lot of this idea that we are essentially made up of the stories we tell ourselves, the cultures we’re surrounded by, and the conventions within them — especially in regards to gender and sexuality and how absurd those conventions are.”

Pasta Negra — On first glance, Pasta Negra is a short film about a few women running a long errand to buy a package of pasta, but the intention of filmmaker Jorge Thielen Armand was to create a fable about three generations of women making different sacrifices and facing their fears. Armand adapted his short film from a short story called “Tijeras” by Karina Sainz Borgo, and the combination of enchanting, verdant landscapes with nonprofessional actors makes Pasta Negra feel at once starkly grounded and outside the realm of reality.   

Somebody Cares — If you’re looking for some laughs with a very good climactic visual effect, Somebody Cares is a perfect short film for you. The piece from director Julien Lasseur centers on a small-time gambler (Shawn Parsons) who is drowning in debt, and just when he thinks no one celebrating his birthday is his biggest problem that day, a ruthless debt collector (Cjon Saulsberry) shows up to remind him things could get so, so much worse. Lasseur tells the audience during the post-premiere Q&A that Somebody Cares started with characters he and writer Brian Groh had been thinking about for a long time prior to the short, and the creation process was one of right time and right place, as the entire film was conceived of and shot — with the help of many friends — in just about two weeks. Sometimes you know it’s a good idea when it just works.

En Memoria — This grounded science fiction short film about a mother (Leslie Martinez), her daughter (Frédérique La Tour), and the preservation of identity against all odds is both moving and just haunting enough to get under your skin. A mother is in the process of making her teenager a quinceañera dress when a debt collector shows up at their door. She’s there on behalf of the art school the mother attended, and because of a default on student loan payments, the debt collector has come to seize any remnant of that education from within the brain of this woman. That means not only dissolving any technical knowledge gained at that time, but also any formative memories of life — including those of when she first met her now-deceased romantic partner. 

En Memoria fills its brief run time with so much rich detail and backstory, and it serves as a reminder that people cannot be stripped of their culture, their heritage, or their personal history, no matter how badly anyone might try to take it from them. “This film is dedicated to immigrants, Latin and Indigenous people, queer and trans folks and their families, and it’s a promise that tech oligarchs, la migra [immigration and customs enforcement], fascism — no matter how strong they think they are — are never stronger than the people united, particularly our families, which is why they’re out here trying to destroy them,” director Roberto Fatal tells the audience. “Don’t let them do that. Remember who we are and where we came from. That’s what this film is about.”

Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites — The writer-director of Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites, Chheangkea, admits to the Festival crowd that he was indeed his own grandma’s favorite. Her name was also Nai, and she was his protector. The filmmaker lost his beloved grandmother when he was about 7 years old, but her grandson’s tribute to her spirit will live on as the winner of this year’s Short Film Jury Award: International Fiction. Chheangkea tells the premiere audience that his piece springs from “a lot of hope and love,” and the playful way he has imagined the ghost of his grandmother running around with another ghost grandma companion and trying to find her grandson a man. Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites is brimming with color, humor, and heart, and it is a testament to the transcendent power of loving a person for who they truly are.