As Park City bids farewell to the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, it leaves the attendees, whether new or old, with a pang. It marks the last festival edition to happen in Utah, but the first since the tragic passing of Robert Redford, the man behind this indie cinema vehicle. While people mourned his loss, they realized the fruits of his legacy through independent film and television projects from across the globe.
Speaking about the lineup, the festival featured a mix of personal and political projects. Olivia Wilde’s ‘The Invite‘ led to a bidding war between distributors, while the Charli XCX mockumentary, ‘The Moment,’ and the Courtney Love documentary, ‘Antiheroine,’ became some of the buzziest titles. Beth de Araújo’s ‘Josephine‘ and Josef Kubota Wladyka’s ‘Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!‘ became highlights for critics and the audiences alike.
In the documentary section, ‘American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez‘ earned a lot of love. ‘American Doctor‘ and ‘Who Killed Alex Odeh?‘ analyzed the continued suppression of Palestinian voices. Beyond those feature-length projects, the episodic projects and shorts introduced some sharp and insightful voices, which may not have received the same level of attention.
With that thought, this list tries to distill the most notable short films Sundance had to offer. The aim is to explore shorts that offered a healthy balance of style and substance and left a strong impression across different themes, approaches, and genres. Please note that this list does not have any titles that were not available in the festival’s online lineup.
Honorable Mentions:
At a time when we’re rarely getting to see any trans or non-binary characters on screen, Jamie Kiernan O’Brien’s ‘Gender Studies‘ feels like a breath of fresh air. It is funny and also quite tender in analyzing a trans college student’s psyche. Also, Jake Junkins is wonderful as the lead. For someone with comedy as their favorite genre, the film was a delight, and so were Matthew Puccini’s ‘Callback‘ and Riley Donigan’s ‘Stairs.’
Puccini’s approach in dealing with an Asian-American gay couple and actors navigating their class differences is a little on-the-nose at times, but Justin H. Min and Michael Hsu Rosen make it work very well. Donigan’s film, which intrigued me right after reading its absurdist premise, is impressive and wickedly funny in highlighting a woman’s pre-wedding, tumbling mental state.
Stephen Curry and Ben Proudfoot’s ‘The Baddest Speechwriter of All’ was also beautiful, with its blend of 2D animation and archival footage in the life of Clarence B. Jones, who played the titular role in Martin Luther King Jr’s life. Yet, considering the sheer expanse of Jones’s compelling work, you end up feeling that it shouldn’t be just a 30-minute short but a feature-length project. Praise Odigie Paige’s strikingly shot and beautifully scored ‘Birdie’ was also one of the highlights.
10. The Boys and the Bees
On paper, it may seem like ‘The Boys and the Bees‘ doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. It tells the story of a black Beekeeper couple living in rural Georgia while raising their two sons, but Arielle Knight’s sensitive direction, paired with the family’s charming bond and nuggets of resonating wisdom, makes it a gently rewarding short. Knight’s narration soothes you into the lull of their way of life through deeply personal moments that reflect their sweet bond. It also offers a portrait of healthy masculinity through simple moments, showing the father’s desire to offer his sons what he couldn’t get from his father. There’s one moment where a son starts crying after a bee stings him. The father calms him down while quietly preparing him for his life’s challenges. It’s because of these carefully rendered portraits, among other things, that the film resonates on a much grander scale.
9. Margo en el DF
This year’s shorts presented some memorable female characters, especially the ones in Ana A. Alpizar’s ‘Norheimsund’ and Lily Platt’s ‘Crisis Actor.’ Yet, Gabriela Ortega’s ‘Margo en el DF’ offered a pleasing mix of filmmaking elements to follow a pregnant Dominican woman in a short that feels like a time capsule and a cultural snapshot at the same time. Set in the mid-90s, it takes us through the life of Marga (played beautifully by Camila Santana), who happens to arrive in Mexico in the wake of Selena Quintanilla’s murder. Since it’s a period drama, you see time-adjacent production design, whether it’s costumes or things like Koss headphones, but it never feels hackneyed, as if it may have. Instead, it becomes simply an embellishment for a tender tale of a woman reclaiming agency. MarÃa Secco’s cinematography is gorgeous, neatly complementing Ortega’s narration that finds a sweet spot between gentle and melancholy, letting the emotion guide us to its core about the emotional complexities in the woman’s life.
8. ¡PIKA!
Gone are the days when we could rely on an unnerving silence to convey the underlying dread in a suburban neighbourhood or a visceral apathy to convey the discontent in a marriage. Instead, themes are taking the centre stage in horror films that fail to scare us. Tom Noakes’s well-shot ‘The Worm’ left me with the same thought, whereas Jill Marie Sachs’s ‘Taga’ felt somewhere in between, effectively presenting the horrors of shallow activism of some Western eco-warriors without class consciousness, whose ignorance becomes the film’s quiet ghost. However, Alex Fischman Cárdenas’s ‘¡PIKA!’ lets its creepy body horror convey a man’s profound yearning after he wakes up with an unbearable scratch. The light is so wonderfully utilized, whether in exterior or interior shots, that you get a sense of the oppressive dryness, literal or figurative. Within 15 minutes or so, Cárdenas offers a remarkable subjective experience where you almost feel like you are living in the skin of his protagonist. Although set in a vastly different environment, it reminded me a bit of Rebecca Hall-led ‘Resurrection.’
7. Don’t Tell Mama
In his festival roundup, Michel Ghanem of TVScholar mentioned that most American projects at the festival he could watch were surprisingly apolitical, given the country’s politically charged nature. ‘Don’t Tell Mama,’ written and directed by Chloe Leigh King and co-produced by Shaka King (the writer-director of ‘Judas and the Black Messiah‘), is a rare example of an American film that cuts through the current socio-political paranoia in the US, albeit through an intensely personal tale. The story centres around a black teenage girl going on a dinner date with her Montenegrin immigrant father. It takes us to some discomforting directions, dissecting their bond through differences in their race, age, and gender, and offers a provocative reflection on the delicate race-dynamics, which may lead to polarizing reactions. Yet, instead of a closure or easy answers to the awkward gaps in their communication, it leaves us with an uncomfortable silence and pondering. Within ten minutes, it leaves us with an emotional trauma, but King’s direction somehow makes the whole affair seem bold and gentle at the same time, a tonal balance that you may be able to appreciate more upon reflection. Besides, the fact that it is so short somehow makes it sting last even longer.
6. Without Kelly
‘Without Kelly’ (Original title: Utan Kelly) is a deceptively simple look into the complications of motherhood that tries to redefine the usual tropes associated with portraits of mothers. The protagonist, played by Medea Strid, is a young mother who leaves her baby daughter, Kelly, at her father’s place while she spends time by herself. Thereafter, she spends the night on a breezy stroll exploring the joys of youthful reverie. The incidents before and after this stroll reveal her pain of leaving the child for the first time, and the script uses every moment to subtly make us reflect on the very nature of distance and intimacy. Lovisa Sirén’s direction uses atmosphere to analyze the emotional complexity of this experience, where one part of her life doesn’t need to negate the other. It’s a wonderfully vibrant but tender short that uses its fifteen minutes to leave with the emotional residue of the character’s joys and apprehensions.
Read: Without Kelly (2026) ‘Sundance’ Short Film Review: Where Love Persists in Memories
5. I’m Glad You’re Dead Now
The Palme d’Or for a short film at last year’s Cannes, ‘I’m Glad You’re Dead Now’, is a meditation on loss, grief, and tainted legacies of those we love. It is a meticulously crafted short that relies on the sensory experience for much of its exposition, letting it silently guide us through this complicated process. Ashraf Barhom’s performance quietly anchors the intense pain of his unresolved traumas, which Tawfeek Barhom’s script doesn’t expand on, but the subtly explored hints of their emotional roots are enough to realize the extent of their anguish. There’s only so much you can say within a span of 13 minutes, but Tawfeek Barhom manages to convey plenty, while offering enough space for the emotions to accumulate instead of rushing through those moments, thus leaving us with a searing emotional residue that may haunt you for weeks.
4. Sauna Sickness
There must be something in the Scandinavian waters that makes people so good at making relationship dramas, and ‘Sauna Sickness’ feels like a good case study in that regard! It begins as a light-hearted drama about a couple on a getaway to one of their parent’s house. Slowly, it builds into a comedy borne out of an argument, which then leads to a few other darkly comedic and subtly tragic directions that the introduction may not have led you to believe. On the surface, it’s yet another story about a couple realizing the cracks in their relationship while undergoing a seemingly minor inconvenience. Yet, the film handles the tonal balance so well that you leave with a peculiar sense of who these people are. Personalities are so well-rendered and presented, thanks to Malin Barr’s impressive writing and direction, apart from all the acting performances, especially of Thea Sofie Loch Næss (who also starred in ‘The Ugly Stepsister’).
3. Cuerpo
This year’s animated shorts section featured a healthy mix of silly, quirky, and humane films that explored experiences from different parts of the world, but the animated short that stands out is MarÃa Cristina Pérez’s ‘Once in a Body’ (Original title: Cuerpo), where form goes hand in hand with the function, leaving us with a visceral experience in its characters’ lives. It features frames painted with acrylic brush strokes that manage to capture the emotional effect of every moment, whether nightmarish or gentle. A narrator guides us through the experiences of two women’s past traumas through surrealistic representations of their intense emotions. An unexplained entity appears in between. Forms get reshaped. Sometimes they look like an ocean you may be sinking into, while at others, it may look like a rope to reach the other end of the abyss. Through this cleverly rendered portrait, it conveys the sheer intensity of the woman’s journey toward self-acceptance, backed by a careful, deeply compassionate narration.
2. Blue Heart
Samuel Suffren’s ‘Blue Heart’ (Alternate title: Coeur Bleu) isn’t led by a conventional form of narrative. Instead, he uses images, music, and short videos from Haiti, which give us a sense of place. They appear in succession, not defined by the constraints of a structure, but through a gently redefined form. We only hear a voiceover and barely any dialogue. Yet, the lyricism of Suffren’s narration registers if you let those sounds and visuals wash over you, showing the routine moments next to immaculately framed and sometimes mystical or magic realist. The film distills the emotional distance between the young lead and his parents through its montage, while mentally transporting you to Haiti. Suffren captures the vibrance and the textural beauty from all these places and things, such as a piece of bright red fabric that aims to connect the past and the present. There also seems to be an undercurrent of Europe’s colonial history with Europe, as the film reveals a personal tale through the eyes of a son who leaves his homeland in pursuit of his dreams.
1. Some Kind of Refuge
While American feature films may not have explored the country’s socio-political climate, short documentaries certainly do, with ‘Luigi’ analyzing the mania around the cultural phenomenon that Luigi Mangione had become, and ‘Still Standing’ presents the aftermath of the tragic wildfires in L.A. through the eyes of its residents. Alexandra Kern’s ‘Some Kind of Refuge’ explores the lives of a small community living on the outskirts of the Mississippi River in New Orleans. They are at once close to the bustling civilization but distant from its capitalistic drivel. It’s a gorgeously shot, transportive piece of cinema that offers a closer look at their unhurried lives while subtly exploring the delicate relationship between humans and nature. Although calm and comforting in its effect, it underlines a collective apprehension related to the climate crisis, which is no longer a matter of a distant future. These gently expressed echoes to our lives are the highlight of this tender, resonating short.
