Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour (2026)

In what seemed like a premiere event, the Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour brought six films from this year’s festival to Wealthy Theatre on Wednesday, Sept. 9. Three of the films won awards in the short jury categories for non-fiction, animation and US fiction. The prestige Sundance brand apparently wasn’t enough to muster more than a mostly unimpressive turnout for the Wednesday night short collection. The six films wore comparable runtimes. The shortest, “Crisis Actor,” was 12 minutes; the longest, “Marga en el DF,” ran only eight minutes longer. Three were American films. The three jury award winners were “The Boys and the Bees” (Nonfiction), “Crisis Actor” (U.S. Fiction) and “Living with a Visionary” (Animation). The other three were from Mexico, India and Sweden, respectively. “The Boys and the Bees” follows a family of Black beekeepers in rural Georgia. It’s beautifully shot and uses the southern sun as a romantic backdrop. The father uses the bees to teach his two boys about life. One of them decides he wants to be stung: dad, mom and his brother have all been stung, so he needs to be stung too. His parental catchphrase, “Talk up like a king,” will stick with me. Their family, like the cinematography, is almost too idyllic to believe.

Usually, beekeeping in film goes wrong at some point: the bugs inevitably become a symbol of life’s thorniness. The family, and director Arielle Knight, resist this narrative: this film is about learning how to care for others and the world around us. A few jolting zooms disrupt the ability to be taken away by the story, though maybe that’s the point. Life jolts us sometimes. These moments are also always in pursuit of the children’s emotions, which can be as random and chaotic as the zooms themselves.

Continue reading at The Rapidian for reviews of Crisis Actor, Marga en el DF, Sauna Sickness, Pankaja, and Living with a Visionary.