Filmmaker Magazine 25 New Faces: 2025 Part 1

Director: Multiple Dirs

2024 / 85min / DCP

The Non-Actor, dir. Eliza Barry Callahan, 18 minutes

In Callahan’s elegant, beautifully acted The Non-Actor, adapted from a section of her recent novel, The Hearing Test, two women (Victoria Pedretti and Maya Hawke) form an unexpected intimate connection when one travels to Los Angeles for an experimental hearing loss treatment.

Grandma Nai Who Played Favorites, dir. Chheangkea, 19 minutes

In Chheangkea’s’s droll Cambodia-set comedy, a 2025 Sundance Jury Prize winner, a deceased grandmother returns from the afterlife to assist her queer grandson, who, under family pressure, is about to get engaged to a woman.

As Told By a Corpse, dir. Yace Sula, 5 minutes

Hypnotic layers of imagery, ranging from the artist’s birth naming ceremony in Silver Spring to glitchy present-day experimentations, create an almost horror-movie feel in Sula’s enigmatic personal short.

Video Barn, dir. Bianca Poletti, 13 minutes

In Poletti’s ’80s-vibing horror short, a teenage girl working in a retro video rental store disappears, and her friend looks for an answer in an ominous VHS tape.

Ragamuffin, dir. Kaitlyn Mikayla, 14 minutes

In Mikayla’s gripping Ragamuffin, which is shot on an actual Georgia racetrack, a 12-year-old aspiring motocross racer faces a series of challenges as she struggles to find a place within the male-dominated sport.

Budget Paradise, dir. LaTajh Simmons-Weaver, 14 minutes

Chester, a Black nonbinary painter, totes their easel, canvas and paint all over Oakland, CA as they look for a place to make art in Simmons-Weaver's loving ode to the city and to the struggles of artists everywhere searching for spaces for their creativity.

Q&A with select filmmakers moderated by Filmmaker Editor-in-Chief Scott Macaulay on Saturday, December 6th