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At Sundance, animation isn’t just spectacle, it’s language. And few films in the Animated Shorts program speak as poetically as The Bird’s Placebo, a surreal and deeply human short from Tunisian animator and filmmaker Rami Jarboui.

In The Chimney Sweeper, filmmaker Jack Raese offers an intimate portrait of tradition and craftsmanship, following a family trade passed down through generations in his Sundance documentary debut.

In Mangittatuarjuk The Gnawer of Rocks, animation director Evan DeRushie reflects on stop motion as a form of cultural stewardship, translating Inuit oral tradition into a tactile and atmospheric Sundance animated short.

Valerie Veatch discusses her Sundance premiering documentary Ghost in the Machine, examining power, authorship, and the real cost of so called artificial intelligence.

María Cristina Pérez discusses her Sundance selected animated short Once in a Body exploring embodiment vulnerability and intimate visual storytelling.

Directed by Lindsay Aksarniq McIntyre, the Sundance selected documentary short offers a tactile, meditative experience rooted in Inuit knowledge, land stewardship, and the enduring bond between people and caribou. Rather than explaining its subject, the film invites viewers to slow down, listen, and feel the material presence of the Arctic landscape.

In Sorrow Doesn’t Sleep at Night, grief takes form in silence, shadow, and memory. Premiering at Sundance, the animated short transforms isolation into an unsettling dreamscape where the past refuses to rest.

In PONIES, espionage isn’t about heroics. It’s about survival. Nicholas Podany breaks down playing Ray Szymanski, a CIA analyst navigating Cold War paranoia through observation, restraint, and quiet awareness.

In a world that often rushes past emotion in favor of efficiency, animator Grace An  slows things down using humor, softness, and surreal imagery to explore memory, family, and identity. Her animated short Cabbage Daddy , selected for the Sundance Film Festival Animated Shorts Program , is a deeply personal film disguised as something playful and strange. What begins with an odd title gradually unfolds into a tender meditation on love, inheritance, and the quiet ways we carry

Animator Kate Renshaw-Lewis discusses her Sundance-selected short Busy Bodies, exploring labor, everyday objects, and hand-drawn animation through surreal, tactile storytelling.

HUGS is a tender animated short exploring connection, vulnerability, and human closeness, premiering in the Sundance Animated Shorts program.

At the Milwaukee Film Festival I sat down with Vince Lawrence , the central figure in Move Your Body The Birth of House Music , directed by Elegance Bratton . What followed was not simply a conversation about sound or nightlife but a powerful reflection on Black identity resistance and the environments that gave birth to a global movement. Lawrence spoke warmly about working with Bratton and producer Chester Algernal Gordon as they shaped a film centered on the earliest momen

At the Milwaukee Film Festival, Thomasville  stood out as a quiet gut punch. A short film that doesn’t rely on spectacle, but instead sits in a fear many people carry and rarely voice. I caught up with writer-director Alex Woodruff to talk about where the film came from, why its dialogue cuts so deep, and what legacy really means to him. Woodruff describes Thomasville  as being born from a personal nightmare: the fear that he would only have moments, or none at all to see his

At the Milwaukee Film Festival, Middletown  arrived not just as a documentary screening, but as a timely reminder of what happens when young people are trusted to lead—and when their voices refuse to be ignored. I sat down with Fred Isaacs, the former high school teacher at the heart of Middletown , whose real-life classroom became the launchpad for a youth-led environmental movement in the 1990s. In the film, Isaacs appears alongside four of his former students, revisiting a