LOS ANGELES, CA, September 30, 2025 — The nonprofit Sundance Institute announced today the 10 projects selected for the inaugural 2025 Sundance Institute Filmmakers Fund sponsored by Chase Sapphire Reserve. The fund provides $120,000 grants to artists from all backgrounds working on feature-length films worldwide. Recipients come from six Institute programs: the Feature Film Program, the Documentary Film Program, the Indigenous Program, Catalyst, the Artist Accelerator Program, and Ignite.
The grant is part of the Institute’s Artist Accelerator Program, which promotes artist development through yearlong fellowships, funding, and ongoing artist support.
“We are thrilled to announce the inaugural grantees of the Sundance Institute Filmmakers Fund sponsored by Chase Sapphire Reserve,” said Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs, Director, Artist Accelerator Program and Women at Sundance Institute. “This partnership allows us to provide artists with critical support, empowering them to take bold creative risks and bring their powerful stories to life. These 10 projects represent the diversity, innovation, and artistic excellence that are at the heart of the artists we support at Sundance Institute. We are deeply grateful to Chase Sapphire Reserve for sharing our commitment to uplifting independent voices and helping us build a more vibrant future for storytelling.”
The 2025 grantees and their selected projects are:
Roni Jo Draper (Co-director) and Marissa Lila Kongao (Co-director and Cinematographer) with WE ARRIVE WITH FIRE | NE-KAH NUUE’M MEHL MECH (U.S.A.): Since time immemorial, Yurok people have placed fire on the land to maintain a balanced ecosystem. In the past century, settlers banned fire, and the environment and people have suffered. Now, Yurok people are returning fire medicine to heal the land.
Roni Jo Draper, Ph.D., is a member of the Yurok tribe, from the village of Weitchpec on the Klamath River. Her experience as a queer Yurok woman has influenced her work as a teacher, scholar, and artist. Draper explores storytelling practices as a way to understand humanity.
Marissa Lila Kongao is a multicultural documentarian and psychedelic healer who was raised in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Their work as a director and producer for film and television centers marginalized perspectives who use storytelling to heal.
Cris Gris (Director) with forward (U.S.A.): After moving to a working-class part of the Hamptons, Latinx teen Ana finds herself drawn to enigmatic Bella, who spends her summer nights roller-skating. As their romance deepens, Ana must navigate the tender terrain of love and identity in a world that feels irreparably divided.
Cris Gris is a Mexican filmmaker whose work has screened at Berlinale, Cannes, and Morelia (Special Jury Award). A Sundance Institute and Film Independent Fellow, she’s directed for HBO Max’s Vgly, ViX’s She Walks Alone, and Amazon Prime Video’s Cometierra (Eartheater).
Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs (Writer-director) with High Steel (Canada, U.S.A.): A Mohawk man splits his time between his reservation with his family and Manhattan, where he ironworks 60 stories above the ground. When he falls for a young photographer in the city, his identity is challenged and he must keep his double life a secret or risk losing everything.
Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs is an award-winning actor, writer, and filmmaker, mainly known for her work in the groundbreaking series Reservation Dogs. Jacobs is currently writing her debut feature film, High Steel, which was selected as part of the 2025 Sundance Institute Directors Lab.
Masami Kawai (Writer-director and Producer) with Valley of the Tall Grass (U.S.A.): When a TV/VCR combo set is thrown out, it survives and circulates through the lives of Indigenous families. In this multicharacter tapestry, rambunctious sisters, struggling artists, a metal scrapper, and his skater daughter intersect and find connection through this seemingly obsolete object.
Masami Kawai is a Los Angeles–born filmmaker who lives in Eugene, Oregon. She’s of Ryukyuan descent from the island of Amami. Her work integrates issues of race, Indigeneity, class, and what it means to be an immigrant/settler in the United States.
Khaula Haider Malik (Writer-director) with Alien Nation (U.S.A.): After retiring, a Pakistani immigrant and his wife pursue a mysterious light in the skies over America. As they meet fellow seekers, their search for alien life reveals the distance between them — and what it means to navigate love, belonging, and wonder in a place that may never feel like home.
Khaula Malik tells character-driven stories grounded in humor, eccentricity, and pathos. She co-produced Apple TV+’s Girls State; is in post-production on her first feature documentary, The Nobles; and is currently filming No. 1 Fan, a documentary about an NFL memorabilia collector.
Mackie Mallison (Writer-director and Producer) with Everything Must Go (U.S.A.): A Japanese American family united by anxiety disorders and vivid daydreams struggles to let go of their dying matriarch.
Mackie Mallison is a filmmaker living in Brooklyn, New York. He is a Sundance Institute fellow, Film at Lincoln Center fellow, and one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Mallison’s short films have screened at SXSW, NYFF, Palm Springs, and BFI and were acquired by The Criterion Channel.
Efraín Mojica (Co-director) and Rebecca Zweig (Co-director and Producer) with Jaripeo (Mexico, U.S.A.): At the rural jaripeos — a regional style of rodeo — in Michoacán, Mexico, a hypermasculine tradition is rife with hidden queer encounters.
Efraín Mojica is a photographer, filmmaker, and performance artist from Michoacán whose work has shown in galleries internationally. Their filmmaking is heavily influenced by their work as a conceptual artist, which explores the translation and interpolation of light, sound, and matter.
Rebecca Zweig is a filmmaker, journalist, and poet based in Mexico City. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Nation, and Nexos, among others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and her filmmaking is shaped by her poetic practice.
Steve Pargett (Producer) with Blacked Out Dreams (U.S.A.): Over seven years, three Black teenagers come of age in Flint as they navigate school closures and a city in crisis. As they step into adulthood, they chase dreams, discover love, and search for belonging.
Steve Pargett is a producer and creative strategist known for powerful, community-driven storytelling. His work spans film, design, and social impact, amplifying underrepresented voices and using creativity to challenge perceptions and inspire change.
Huda Razzak (Writer-director) with Home of the Birds (U.S.A.): A small nightingale bird and her grandpa, both unable to fly, embark on a mythical cross-country journey with a human family to their hometown in 1963 Iraq, with the hopes of reuniting with her long-lost parents.
Huda Razzak is an animation filmmaker based in Atlanta whose parents immigrated from Iraq. In 2022, her short film The Ocean Duck won the Oscar-qualifying Jury Award for Best Animated Short at NYICFF. Razzak has also produced and directed content for Sesame Street and recently worked in production at Netflix Animation.
Walter Thompson-Hernández (Writer-director) with If I Go Will They Miss Me (U.S.A.): Twelve-year-old Lil Ant struggles to connect with his emotionally distant father when he begins to see surreal, spectral visions of Black boys drifting around his neighborhood in South Central, Los Angeles.
Walter Thompson-Hernández wrote and directed the short film If I Go Will They Miss Me (2022 Sundance Film Festival), which was awarded the Short Film Jury Award: U.S. Fiction presented by XRM Media. He recently developed the feature-length adaptation with the support of the Sundance Institute Directors and Screenwriters Labs.
Sundance Institute
As a champion and curator of independent stories, the nonprofit Sundance Institute provides and preserves the space for artists across storytelling media to create and thrive. Founded in 1981 by Robert Redford, the Institute’s signature labs, granting, and mentorship programs, dedicated to developing new work, take place throughout the year in the U.S. and internationally. Sundance Institute Collab, a digital community platform, brings a global cohort of working artists together to learn from Sundance Institute advisors and connect with each other in a creative space, developing and sharing works in progress. The Sundance Film Festival and other public programs connect audiences and artists to ignite new ideas, discover original voices, and build a community dedicated to independent storytelling. Through the Sundance Institute artist programs, we have supported such projects as Beasts of the Southern Wild, The Big Sick, Bottle Rocket, Boys Don’t Cry, Boys State, Call Me by Your Name, Clemency, CODA, Dìdi (弟弟), Drunktown’s Finest, The Farewell, Fire of Love, Flee, Fruitvale Station, Half Nelson, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Hereditary, The Infiltrators, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Little Woods, Love & Basketball, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Mudbound, Nanny, One Child Nation, Pariah, Raising Victor Vargas, RBG, Requiem for a Dream, Reservoir Dogs, Sin Nombre, Sorry to Bother You, Strong Island, Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Swiss Army Man, A Thousand and One, Top of the Lake, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, and Zola. Through year-round artist programs, the Institute also nurtured the early careers of such artists as Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Gregg Araki, Darren Aronofsky, Lisa Cholodenko, Ryan Coogler, Nia DaCosta, The Daniels, David Gordon Green, Miranda July, James Mangold, John Cameron Mitchell, Kimberly Peirce, Boots Riley, Ira Sachs, Quentin Tarantino, Taika Waititi, Lulu Wang, and Chloé Zhao. Support Sundance Institute in our commitment to uplifting bold artists and powerful storytelling globally by making a donation at sundance.org/donate. Join Sundance Institute on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube, and Bluesky.
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MEDIA CONTACTS: Tiffany Duersch, tiffany_duersch@sundance.org; Alex Courides, alex_courides@sundance.org
