Filmmakers Lily Platt and Lovisa Sirén Are Rocking Shorts This Winter

The 2026 Sundance Film Festival brings two filmmakers from different continents with short films that feel like emotional x-rays: precise, intimate and unafraid of discomfort. New York-based director Lily Platt premieres her debut short Crisis Actor, a sharp and darkly comic portrait of a woman addicted to performance and chaos. Swedish filmmaker Lovisa Sirén returns to Sundance with Without Kelly (Utan Kelly), an aching, one-night drama about early motherhood, separation and the terror of rediscovering oneself. Together, their films form an accidental dialogue about identity — how we perform it, lose it and try to reclaim it when life stops playing along.

“I was always a huge consumer of film and television, and I started out working in documentary film as a producer,” Platt says. She worked as a staff producer at Story Syndicate, making docuseries for HBO and Netflix before enrolling in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2023. When she learned that Crisis Actor had been accepted into Sundance, her reaction was one of disbelief. “I was beyond delighted and shocked and just incredibly flattered,” Platt says. Crisis Actor follows Celine, a struggling actress whose personal life has collapsed but whose hunger for drama remains insatiable. In the wake of a breakup, she holds her ex’s belongings hostage, cons customer service representatives for sport and impersonates patients with rare illnesses at her day job as a standardized medical actor.

“I love the challenge of how to reveal the lie.”

The film grew out of Platt’s fascination with liars. “I had made a film, another short, about a woman who lies about a pregnancy and planned abortion to manipulate her ex-boyfriend into caring for her,” Platt explains. “I really love the character, and I love the challenge, narratively, of how to reveal the lie and how to kind of maximize the dramatic effect of that revelation.” With Crisis Actor, Platt pushes that idea further, exploring lying not just as deception but as rehearsal. “I really see her lying as a way for her to practice performing,” Platt says about Celine. “I think that she primarily approaches those interactions with the spirit of playfulness and a desire to effectively embody or execute a certain character, and also just to get the most dramatic effect out of any given moment.” That tension — between authenticity and spectacle — comes from personal observation. “I grew up around a lot of performers and artists and actors,” Platt says. “I think the line between entertaining people and kind of fooling them is interesting.” It’s also where the comedy lives. Actors, she notes, are especially good at generating absurd scenarios for themselves, and Crisis Actor leans into that with surgical precision. Anchored by a stellar performance from actress Sarah Steele, Crisis Actor is a debut short film that’s both wickedly funny and genuinely unsettling.

“I think the line between entertaining people and kind of fooling them is interesting.”

Where Crisis Actor explodes with talk and performance, Without Kelly (Utan Kelly) is quiet, spare and raw. The film marks Sirén’s second Sundance appearance and arrives already carrying major accolades: It won the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival and is a Swedish Academy Award (Guldbagge) nominee, with further screenings set at the Göteborg Film Festival. Sirén’s journey into filmmaking was less linear and more exploratory. “In my early 20s I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do,” Sirén says. “But the most fun and exciting and interesting thing, I thought, was films.” After studying television, then film history, she turned to editing as a way in. Editing music videos led her to make her own short films simply to have more material to cut. One experiment became another, and then another, until directing revealed itself as the throughline.

“This is closer to myself and personal, like very intimate subjects and experiences.”

Without Kelly is inspired by Sirén’s own experience as a young parent, though she’s been careful to draw a boundary between life and art. “A little bit in the beginning, I felt hesitant,” Sirén admits, “because this is closer to myself and personal, like very intimate subjects and experiences.” That hesitation faded as she shaped the story into something more abstracted and distilled. “In some ways, I distanced myself from the actual piece,”  Sirén says. “So then it [became] something else, but inspired by me.” The film follows a mother on the first night she’s separated from her daughter, a moment that fractures her sense of self. Sirén frames the story around dependence — emotional, physical and existential. “When you have a small child, and you’re also very young, you are dependent on the child,” Sirén explains. The separation forces a reckoning: Who is she without the constant physical presence of her daughter, without the identity of caregiver? Compressing the story into a single night was both a practical and emotional choice. “I had a longer story that takes place during the week,” Sirén says, “but I wanted to make a short film, so I took all the juicy bits and put it in one day, in one night.” The compression intensifies the experience, trapping the audience inside the mother’s restless, aching consciousness as she moves through bars, beds and streets, searching for connection that never quite satisfies.

Though wildly different in tone and geography, Platt and Sirén share a commitment to emotional honesty, even when it’s uncomfortable or unflattering. Both films center women in moments of collapse, when identity becomes unstable and desire overwhelms good sense. At Sundance 2026, Crisis Actor and Without Kelly stand as reminders of what short films do best: capture a single emotional crisis and make it echo far beyond its runtime.

Read more of SLUG’s coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival