William David Caballero and Milly Caballero attend the “TheyDream” Premiere during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival at Library Center Theatre on January 23, 2026 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images)
By Adam Silverstein
When the lights dim at the Library Center Theatre, the room already feels tender. There’s a quiet attentiveness as TheyDream begins, and it doesn’t take long to understand why. William David Caballero’s new film, premiering in the Next category, is small in scale but expansive in feeling: a beautifully animated, deeply personal meditation on family, memory, and what it means to live alongside pain.
Caballero is introduced by Mexican-American acting legend Edward James Olmos, who doesn’t hedge his praise. Calling Caballero “one of the great filmmakers around today,” Olmos tells the audience, “This film will make you understand who you are.”
TheyDream unfolds as a love letter — to Caballero’s Puerto Rican family, to cinema itself, and to the act of making something when everything feels like it’s slipping away. Set largely in North Carolina, the film chronicles years of family life shaped by illness and loss: Caballero’s father living with diabetes and kidney failure, his grandmother battling cancer, the constant oscillation between ordinary moments and devastating ones.
What makes TheyDream quietly astonishing is how it visualizes that process. Using animation, green screen, and meticulously crafted miniature sets, Caballero resurrects moments and people who are no longer here. Loved ones are brought back not as ghosts, but as figures imbued with warmth and humor. The technique is inventive without ever feeling showy.
The film doesn’t shy away from conflict. Caballero addresses his father’s inability to accept his sexuality with the ache of distance and the longing to be seen. TheyDream is, in many ways, a film about living with unresolved pain and learning how to carry it without letting it hollow you out.
Ahead of the screening, Caballero speaks plainly. “This film took me four years to make,” he says, then adds, “and in many ways, a lifetime.” He also pushes back against the current cultural moment with a line that lands hard: “Diversity will never be a dirty word.” The applause is immediate.
By the time the credits roll, the theater is silent — then rises. Caballero receives a standing ovation that feels less like celebration and more akin to gratitude. During the Q&A, he brings his mother Milly onstage as a guest of honor, to rousing applause. She doesn’t want to speak for long, but she does say, simply, “I’m very proud of my son.”
Caballero explains that the purpose of the film was “to allow all of us to have a communal catharsis — tears of sadness, but hopefully by the end, tears of joy.” He talks about wanting his mother to move forward with her grief, and about art’s ability to transform suffering rather than erase it. “This film is a bridge to understanding,” he says.
Caballero, whose earlier shorts Victor & Isolina and Chilly and Milly also screened at the Festival, is back for the final year in Park City with a film that feels like both a culmination and a beginning. TheyDream is intimate, inventive, and human — proof that telling a small story can open something big.
