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Sundance 2025: Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)

A man is leaning on a fence as large birds fly overhead.Still from Mad Bills to Pay.

Reflecting in 1983 on her early years at a literary agency, novelist Isabel Colegate ruefully recalled writing reader reports that involved ”mostly explaining in detail why the typescripts concerned were quite unpublishable, falling as they did so very far below the standards set by the world’s greatest literature, which in my ignorance of there being any other standards I was applying to them. My reports must have been deeply disheartening.” There are two tones at work here: one a rueful regret at her past self’s lack of charity, the other a reminder that if we’re not striving for greatness on some level, what’s the point? Throughout Sundance, I continuously alternate between both modes: my goal isn’t to always whip myself into a perpetual Bill Hicks lather, but the quality ratio here sometimes drives me wild.

Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake), as its title implies, plays like an adaptation of a contemporary short story collection that doesn’t exist. Drawing upon her rural Michigan childhood, writer-director Sierra Falconer spins out a brisk four tales in 87 minutes, all but one of which fly at the same tonal register: vaguely tremulous but low-key about it, intimate in characterization and scale. It begins with “Sunfish,” in which teen Lu (Maren Heary) is dropped at her grandparents’—Nan (Marcline Hugot) and Pop (Adam LeFevre)—for the summer by her freshly remarried mom. Sulking over her abandonment, Lu finds autonomy by learning how to sail a small craft while her grandparents beam lovingly at her. Nan and Pop are also keen lakeside birdwatchers and delight in seeing, for the first time in years, a baby loom. That loomlet (vocabulary word: acquired) is a stand-in for Lu, who eventually spots the baby bird’s mother and yells at her for abandoning her child, a clearly articulated metaphor that makes it easy for viewers to keep up. This segment is fully representative of Sunfish’s strengths (regional specificity, competent blocking and staging) and weaknesses (being terminally anodyne and unsurprising). There’s an awkward handoff from Lu sailing on the lake to the kids up the way at Interlochen’s music camp as a shot leaps from lake to land into the second story. Both that and the fourth one are tonally and scale-wise identical; the third, “Two Hearted,” introduces magical realism into the mix, which should juice up the excitement level but doesn’t. 

I was less compelled by the film than the question of how it was made: Joanna Hogg signed on as an executive producer last year, but Sunfish boasts no production company credits, and its two main producers are Falconer herself and Grant Ellison, neither of whom have any previous credits. Where did this come from? This is Falconer’s UCLA master’s thesis film; some funds came from thesis grants and Ellison has mentioned investing some of his and Falconer’s own funds in the film. Further digging led me to the Alabaster Fund, “a private family foundation founded in 2003 by Erik and Leslie Falconer. It is now managed by Erik, Leslie and their three daughters, Sierra, Emily and Maddy,” and its “partners innovate projects in Africa, Asia, Europe, South American and the USA.” While I am not, in principle, against filmmakers leveraging family resources to make a movie (many good ones have emerged this way, and it’s basically unavoidable), in this case it’s not worth un-leveling the playing field.

Another student film-turned-debut feature allowed me to wrap my Sundance 2025 viewing on a more positive note, which is what I actually want. More or less expanded from what began as a short film made under the auspices of London’s National Film School, Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) tracks the extremely attenuated coming-of-age of 19-year-old Rico (Juan Collado). If there’s something like an ideal unplanned father barely out of high school, Rico’s not him: he spends summer days selling nutcrackers (an alcoholically potent NYC specialty) at the beach, the rest of his time either getting drunk or smoking weed alone in his room. But Rico got his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) pregnant, and he’s convinced that the absolutely right thing to do here is have the baby despite being majestically financially and emotionally ill-equipped to do so; he won’t repeat the path of being an absent father like his own dad, and abortion is not on the table. One master shot at a time, Mad Bills tracks the start-stop-stop-stop-start progress Rico makes in getting a job, trying not to hit on other women in front of the soon-to-be mother of his child and generally getting it together. The appropriate tonal comp here, if only because of a shortage of films about Dominican teens in the Bronx, is Raising Victor Vargas, although this film is a little more somber.

Its plot is less important than Mad Bills’s two biggest merits. One is the lived-in, often very funny naturalism of its four livewire central performers: Rico, Destiny, the former’s sister Sally (Nathaly Navarro), whose laughing glee when her idiot brother confesses the pregnancy is irrepressible, and their mom (Yohanna Florentino). There’s much overlapping yelling between all four performers in scenes that editor Irfan van Tuijl will often cut away from abruptly into the next one—the resolution of each conflict is never the point, but the rhythm of semi-comic confrontation juices things along. Mad Bills is also a film that, by Vargas’s own noting, is overtly visually influenced by Pedro Costa, which becomes obvious early on when Rico wakes-and-bakes in a splash of Costa-yellow morning light. What’s important about this influence is less the reference for its own sake than the evidence it bears: a new generation of American independent filmmakers is arriving, they’ve had streaming access to large film libraries for a while, and their work is going to show engagement with the totality of world cinema rather than the hermetic subset of Amerindie norms dominating Sundance selections. Not a moment too soon—and so, on that optimistic note, on to Sundance 2026. 

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