By Ramona Flume

Short Film Program 1 helped kick off the distinguished opening day lineup for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival on January 22 at the Library Center Theatre. The six-film program (one of this year’s eight curated shorts programs presented by Ketel One Vodka) features a collection of fiction and nonfiction short films from around the world, each of which uniquely captures the extraordinary circumstances and strange possibilities of everyday life, from JJ Adler’s The Oracle to Stephen P. Neary’s Living with a Visionary. 

Heidi Zwicker, senior programmer at the Sundance Film Festival, was onstage to introduce this collection (representing animation, documentary, U.S. fiction, and international fiction), giving a warm welcome to the directors and reminding the audience that 11,000 short films were submitted and only 54 projects were ultimately selected for this year’s Festival shorts programs, so the following films were sure to be extremely special. Several cast and crew members of each film were in the audience, and the mood felt especially celebratory as the house lights went down.

First to screen, The Oracle, from writer-director JJ Adler, stars Kurt Fuller as a psychiatrist who is unexpectedly called to commune with his spiritual beliefs (or lack thereof) when his new con artist patient (Brandon Scott Jones) speaks to him under hypnosis in the secret language of his dead twin brother. Is this a coincidence or a con? Is the doctor part of, or in on, a larger cosmic joke? The skeptical doctor is desperate for a plausible explanation of the impossible, and the Library audience delighted with laughter as his bewilderment and agitation increased throughout the short. “I wanted to make a film about what it takes to lose one’s outer certainty,” Adler says in the post-screening Q&A. “I’d been talking to a lot of people who had had completely new spiritual experiences, and what I thought was really fun about this conversation is how moved each person was by these experiences as they were telling me about it — and how insane it sounded.”  

Next up, Sauna Sickness gave audiences a cringe-inducing look at a toxic relationship in a serene-turned-spooky setting. This short marks the Sundance Film Festival debut of Swedish writer-director Malin Barr, who says the story was inspired by an experience she had in a previous relationship. (“Sad, but true,” she says with a laugh in the post-screening Q&A.) When asked by an audience member how she managed to cultivate such a deep sense of suspense in such a short film, Barr replies, “I think I just really like discomfort,” pausing to laugh again with the audience. “I was also trying to reflect the hot and cold of a toxic relationship. Both in the initial hot and cold places, but also in the tempo. Certain scenes feel fast and disorienting, whereas when they’re sitting in the sauna and we’re shooting it very, very slow and you just feel like you want to get out.” The resulting icy but comically karmic film delivered a satisfying final payoff that had the crowd cackling justifiably and applauding as the credits rolled. 

Living with a Visionary, narrated by James Cromwell and animated by hand by director Stephen P. Neary, is an emotional powerhouse of a short — based on the true story of John Matthias who struggled to care for his wife of 50 years as she suffered from vivid hallucinations brought on by Parkinson’s. This is a deeply personal film, showcasing how two disparate realities came to a heartbreaking head just as the pandemic set in. But the universal parallels of what it expresses about love, loss, and the grief of growing apart were felt throughout the theater, including by one audience member who shared that his own aunt had died from Parkinson’s during COVID. “I think we’ve all had to say goodbye to somebody at this point who is maybe a little bit gone already,” Neary says about the origins of his short, which began in 2021 when he read a New Yorker article by Matthias and felt moved to adapt the touching story. “We had so many long conversations and finally [Matthias] said, ‘This was a really painful experience, but you have my blessing. This is something Diana, who loved the arts, would have enjoyed also. So, just make it and please stop talking to me.’”

Sundance Ignite x Adobe fellow Anooya Swamy presented her short, Pankaja, a tender mother-daughter story about love, resilience, and persistence in the face of hardships and the unknown. The fictional tale, which she made as part of her graduate film program at NYU, was shot in India and inspired by her relationship with her own mother, who was in the audience along with Swamy’s father. The film follows a worried, weary mother trying to track down her missing husband throughout the streets of Bangalore, all while protecting the joy of her young daughter. “[This] was inspired by my time growing up,” Swamy says about the project she made “with a lot of love” back home in Bangalore. “It was a personal story that I wanted to encapsulate in a present that still feels a lot like the past … to think about our time coming up in the streets — and now we’re here.” The crowd, including her parents, cheered in response. 

Candy Bar, a devilishly sweet story of an unlikely con at a movie theater, was a noticeable crowd favorite. This is the eighth Sundance Film Festival short premiere from writer-director Nash Edgerton, who cast his youngest daughter, Zumi, in the leading role alongside Damon Herriman (Together, 2025 Sundance Film Festival). “She’s wonderful and she’s the whole reason we’re here,” Edgerton says of his daughter, who he cajoled into standing up at her seat in the theater as the audience erupted into applause during the Q&A session. After Zumi expressed an interest in acting, Edgerton reached out to Harriman and asked: “Do you have any fun ideas that would be good for you and a nine-year-old girl to play opposite each other?” Edgerton received the script the very next morning, and the rest was history. Clocking in at only six minutes, this short packed in a lot of cheeky fun, and the audience happily followed along with bursts of raucous laughter throughout this jaunty, mischievous case of mistaken identity. 

La Tierra del Valor (The Home of the Brave), from director Cristina Costantini (SALLY, winner of the 2025 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize), rounded out the day’s Short Film Program 1 screening. Costantini’s inspiring documentary short follows Los Angeles singer Nezza, who went viral when she performed the national anthem in Spanish at Dodger Stadium during a tense, politically charged summer marked by increasing incidents of racial violence and ICE raids. “First, I just want to say Nezza is in the audience,” Costantini says during the Q&A session. The audience burst into wild cheers when the singer and star of the short stood up, shyly smiling and waving to an enthused crowd who had just witnessed the raw nerve and emotion of her song-as-protest that occurred on the same day as the 2025 No Kings Day protests. “I watched her sing the national anthem … and like many Latinas and Latinos, it really moved a lot of us. It was right when we needed it most,” Costantini says. “Nezza has taught me so much. And like she says in the film: ‘Doing the right thing doesn’t always feel safe, but it always feels right.’ So thank you for inspiring all of this.”