Getting off the Fence

🔗 10 Things We’re Paying Attention To

1. Sundance Winners! - Big congrats to Ben Proudfoot for adding another major trophy to his stacked awards cabinet, as The Baddest Speechwriter of All takes the Grand Jury Prize. S/W-featured filmmakers Stephen Neary and Don Hertzfeldt were also acknowledged. On the feature side, S/W alums fared even better! Josephine Decker took home the coveted Jury and Audience double in US Dramatic, while Nuisance Bear grabbed the Jury award in US Doc. Myrsini Aristidou, Stephanie Ahn, Liz Sargent, and Olive Nwosu saw their films awarded, as well.

2. Eulogies to Park City - Had I gone, this Sundance would have been my 10th in-person, so I’m emotionally susceptible to the many reminiscences being published as the festival waves farewell to its longtime home. Two of my favorites were from influential agent Rena Ronson in THR, and critic Justin Chang for The New Yorker.

3. Sundance in Boulder: What Does That Look Like? - Chris O’Falt in Indiewire is always a must-read, and he quizzes dozens of industry players for their take on what Sundance’s relocation could mean.

4. Details on The Oscar Shorts Theatrical - The popular program that brings the Oscar-nominated shorts to US theaters has a date…and a new distributor. The date is Feb 20th, but the entity presenting them will not be Shorts TV, which spearheaded the program’s creation in 2006. Instead, Roadside Attractions picks up the mantle and will have Taika Waititi as a presenter.

5. Cartoon Network Resurrects ‘Cartoon Cartoons’ - Animation Magazine heralds the return of the Cartoon Cartoons moniker by sharing its debut short, A for Angel. Announced in 2021, this is the company’s first short film program in over a decade. Many of Cartoon Network’s early hits began life as short pilots before becoming series, and the revival of Cartoon Cartoons looks like an attempt to tap into that same dynamic once again.

6. Nominations for BAFTA and ACE Eddie - The UK’s main award show announced nominees in its two short film categories, ‘British Short Animation’ and ‘British Short Film.’ Also, the awards from The American Cinema Editors are out, with the debut of a new ‘Best Edited Short’ category (which we are a qualifier for 😉). Congrats!

7. YouTuber Almost Wins the Weekend Box Office - Markiplier is a popular YouTube personality, largely known for celebrating and promoting indie horror video games on his 38M subscriber channel. He is now a legitimate box office draw, after his video game adaptation, Iron Lung, earned over $17M this weekend. To put into perspective, that figure surpasses the US box office of every Sundance 2025 feature film combined. This is not like the RackaRacka boys teaming up with A24 either—Markiplier wrote, directed, and starred in the film, and self-distributed to over 3000 theaters. To learn more, I suggest his appearance on the Button Mash podcast, which has the benefit of an interviewer who knows and appreciates the video game aspect of the story. We’ve been saying it for a while, but online creators and what we think of as “the industry” are going to blur—we’ve just seen a prime example.

8. The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films - The Atlantic is ground-zero for “what’s wrong with kids these days?” articles, but this trend is still pretty bad!

9. Cate Blanchett Presents Shorts From The Displacement Fund - At Rotterdam, the star actress screened five commissioned shorts on the subject of “displacement.” Directors from Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Ukraine were awarded $100k each to craft the films, which, collectively, received a rapturous review from The Guardian.

10. What to Watch - I watched Arco this week with my family and really dug it. Oscar-nominated in the Animated Feature Film category and distributed by NEON, the film is from Ugo Bienvenu and Félix de Givry through their production company Remembers. The S/W connection is that Bienvenu and de Givry executive-produced one of our favorite animated shorts to release online this year, the inimitable A Kind of Testament. While I found Arco to be overly familiar in structure, what Bienvenu fills that structure with is original and highly memorable. His vision of the future and the need to move beyond the sci-fi of the 50s comes through quite clearly, and left me hopeful and emotional. The film is in US theaters now.

🤖 AI Corner

I took in Sundance virtually this week, mostly watching features at home from S/W alums (Nuisance Bear and Take Me Home are both excellent). But, it wasn’t just movie-watching; I also spent Thursday and Friday tuning in to the festival’s online Story Forum. A series of panels presented over Zoom, with a mission to “explore the latest ideas and creative technologies in storytelling,” the majority of the panels were… permutations on how to use AI to augment different aspects of filmmaking!?

Sundance has been slowly rolling out AI courses via its Collab filmmaker education platform for a few months now, and Gotham has held a couple of workshops. But, surprisingly, AI is still danced around as a topic. That might be changing. The prominence of AI at the Story Forum, coming on the heels of the Institute announcing an AI Literacy Initiative in partnership with The Gotham, Film Independent, and Daniel Kwan’s new Creators Coalition on AI, served as an inflection moment for me—the infrastructure of American independent filmmaking appears ready to normalize the use of AI tools.

In some sense, this is to be expected—festivals gain credibility by leading trends and presenting themselves as being on the cutting edge of developments. I still remember the modern VR boom kicking off at my first Sundance in 2012, with a young Palmer Luckey providing tech support during Nonny de la Pena’s interactive experience, Hunger in Los Angeles. These orgs couldn’t afford to be wishy-washy anymore; alternatives would emerge to fill the vacuum. Runway has already announced the 4th edition of its impressive festival and announced a debut summit in March, headlined by star producer Kathleen Kennedy. One of the Story Forum panelists, Maddy Hong, successfully organized a new event dedicated to AI, The Chroma Awards, this fall.

There is, frankly, a lot of money potentially in play. Tech has more money than God and is spending like crazy on AI. Google is bankrolling the AI Literacy project, and just ponied up a $1M prize for an AI short film at the 1 Billion Follower Summit. They look eager to spend on content, coming off an (unsuccessful) Oscar campaign for the short film Sweet Water, and having sunk money into Darren Aronofsky’s AI studio, Primordial Soup. Primordial Soup just premiered a high-profile history series in partnership with Time Inc., and a Primordial Soup short film, Ancestra, was one of the star panels at Story Forum.

On the other hand, it is a fraught move because a huge part of the film community is deathly opposed to any incursions from AI and hopes to maintain a prohibition via socially enforced stigma. Sundance isn’t leading the charge; the community of AI first-adopters and hobbyists is well established at this point, but Sundance’s belated embrace does hurt this attempt to make a boycott of AI tools in filmmaking stick.

Ultimately, though, I’m not critical of the decision these orgs have taken. It was time to make a choice, and I think prohibition is a naive idea—the positive case for AI is too plausible, and the money behind the technology is too great. Tech’s arrogance for disrupting industries they know little about is infuriating, but also inevitable, and who is to say that Entertainment doesn’t deserve to be disrupted? Most would argue that the industry is not healthy at this moment and hasn’t been in a long while. The CCAI’s stance, therefore, strikes me as correct—if AI is coming whether we like it or not, better to engage with it and shape its implementation in a way that honors and protects what we find most important.

The traditional organs of independent filmmaking in the US have been quiet about AI in a way that is historically unusual. But that doesn’t seem likely to sustain, and I’m going to remember Sundance 2026 as an understated, but key milestone for that.

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