This past weekend at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, IndieWire hosted the “Shaping the Future – Voices of Next-Gen Filmmakers” panel at the Adobe House. The conversation featured filmmakers who had been supported by the Adobe Film & TV Fund, an initiative dedicated to helping underrepresented creators and filmmakers find career opportunities through a variety of different programs, including the Latinx House, Gold House, and Ignite fellowships.
In a conversation moderated by IndieWire’s Chris O’Falt, “Selena y Los Dinos” director Isabel Castro, “Hold Me Close” co-director/cinematographer/co-editor Aurora Brachman, “The Librarians” editor María Gabriela Torres, “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” editor Mario Fierro, and filmmaker Mel Mah talked about their road to Sundance and what it is like to be an independent film artist in 2025. The conversation, which you can watch at the top of this page, was a frank look at the challenges and long hours it takes to fulfill one’s dreams of striving to make a career as an independent documentary filmmaker.
“It’s hard to make a lot of money as a director when you’re emerging, it’s more of an expensive hobby than something you are paid to do,” said Brachman. “And when you are paid, especially in documentary, you don’t get paid that much. And so I’ve worn a lot of hats.”
As a cinematographer, Brachman, in addition to her own very personal short (“Hold Me Close”), also helped shoot a feature playing at this year’s festival, and in previous years was part of the producing teams of films that played Sundance.
“It’s really hard to say, ‘No, I’m gonna put that work aside to make the time, so that I can dedicate to my own creative craft because my goal is to be a director,” said Brachman. “It’s believing that you are worth it, there’s a scarcity mindset that you have to try and let go of, and it’s very, very hard to actually carve out the time to pour into your own project…and often the last cup that gets filled is your own.”
For Brachman, an Ignite fellow, non-profit support does supply some space to make room for her own projects, but the benefit is often more than financial.
“All of us on this stage are people of color, and I think that in different environments, we are taken more or less seriously, and I think sometimes these institutional stamps of approval are even more critical for us because without them, it’s very hard to be taken seriously,” said Brachman. “It’s funny because I’m also working on a feature. I’ve been working on it for five years now, and when I’m in other settings and I’m pitching the film, people’s eyes glaze over. And I’ve noticed when I’m here [at Sundance with a film, and part of the Sundance Ignite x Adobe fellowship], it’s like, I’m pitching the film and everyone’s like, ‘Woooow.’ These settings matter. They change the way you’re perceived.”
Castro is proof of the tenacity it takes to get a feature to Sundance. Prior to “Mija,” which premiered at Sundance 2022, she had three shorts rejected by the festival. But eventually she received one of the Sundance Institute’s coveted Documentary Fund grants for “Mija,” giving the project the momentum needed for it to start to “snowball.” After five years of hard work on “Mija,” a feature documentary about young Latina manager Doris Muñoz, was met with critical praise and a Disney/FX distribution deal after its Sundance debut. But Castro warned that things don’t get any easier after that initial success.
“As you start getting more and more visible, especially as filmmakers of color, you get more and more tokenized, and you are asked to make more streamlined versions of other people’s imaginations, and it’s so hard to turn down money and stability and jobs in the pursuit of self-expression and exploration and potential other failure,” said Castro. “You get put into this system [where] it’s like they’re dangling gold in front of you, and saying, ‘Follow me,’ and you have to trust yourself.”
Castro, who this weekend premiered her much anticipated “Selena y Los Dinos,” a documentary about the “Queen of Tejano Music,” Selena Quintanilla, joked that after “Mija” she promised herself she would not take a gig making a celebrity doc. And when Quintanilla’s family and music label approached her, she was given pause.
“I had long conversations with them, saying, ‘Are you guys going to trust me? Will you guys let me present this in the way that I would like to, which is going to let the archival breathe. It might feel different than the Selena Quintanilla documentary that you would want me to make.’ And I only took the job because they said yes to that,” said Castro. “To have yourself as a North star, it’s a very challenging thing to continue to do day in and day out.”
It’s a different road to your first Sundance as an editor, but just as difficult. Living in Denver, “Sweet Talkin’ Guy” editor Mario Fierro had to create his own opportunities to break into the film industry.
“I started with a hundred dollar camera,” said Fierro. “I started doing weddings, quinceañeras, and went to the University of Denver for my undergrad and I became the video guy — if you were in a fraternity or sorority, you would see me with a camera.”
With a lot of hustle and persistent emails, Fierro was able to make inroads as a videographer in the music world, first for singer/rapper Todrick Hall and Lady Gaga’s choreographer Richy Jackson, and eventually spending two lucrative years working for Cardi B. Along the way, with a detour to AFI grad school, Fierro’s ultimate dream was to become an editor working in film and television.
“When I started getting flown to New York five times a month for Cardi, and it was super cool and everything, but I had just turned 30 and I was like, ‘Okay, am I going to be 60 years old with a camera following like a celebrity?’” said Fierro.
Walking away from good money to build a career as a full-time editor was a leap of faith and a bit of financial shock, and he credits his Adobe Latinx House fellowship with helping make the transition. Fellow editor and Latinx House alum, María Gabriela Torres, who edited the feature documentary “The Librarians” premiering at Sundance 2025, concurred.
“I think for people like us, that are the next generation, the concern is how am I going to be given the next chance?,” said Torres. “Because I feel lucky that I was given a chance, and I think it’s a conversation that we should all be having, how do we give each other opportunities and this is when opportunities, like what the Latinx House has done for us, what Adobe has done for us, really matter — to give us voices and to give us platforms to put our names out there and to help us get another job.”
Mah is mid-journey in the road to getting her passion project out into the world, coming to Sundance 2025 with her script “This Way to Home” – a father-daughter dramedy about a queer Chinese Canadian teenager, and her emotionally stoic father (Ken Jeong attached) road tripping from Toronto to Los Angeles to catch the next solar eclipse. For Mah, who started her career on the studio side of film and TV, the north star in developing the project is making something she wants to see on screen.
“The way I pitch the tone is that it’s ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ meets ‘Lady Bird,’ but with Asian characters,” said Mah, who based the film on her own road trips with her father. “I always wanted a film like that. I could watch ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ over and over again, and I just wanted to see my experience and my story, our stories, more properly represented.”
With actor Stephan James’ Bay Mills Studios producing, Mah is at Sundance seeking the final piece of financing to get the green light, but what she gets from being at the festival is a different type of fuel.
“The thing that I love about coming to Sundance, and being in community and watching films, is that I always get filled with so much inspiration and hope that we really can do something to make a difference by making these films,” said Mah. “These stories are so hard [to make], but it’s through that hardship and through those obstacles that we have to dig so deep into ourselves to create something that can move other people.”
