Sundance Film Festival

And I, you know, doing that, like...

It's a Sundance Labs thing.

That's exactly what you do, yeah.

Exactly.

When I...

I was lucky enough to be at Sundance at the world premiere of Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

Nice.

And Taika Waititi brought up some of the cast who were present before, just...

We, Slamdance Film Festival premiered the film.

Slamdance, not Sundance.

It's the alternative to Sundance, which is now its own kinda large festival that moved out of P- Park City.

It started in Park City as a alternative to Sundance.

Like, we're just gonna, we're just gonna sop off the crowds from Sundance and bring 'em to our festival.

And uh, and now it's in, in Los Angeles and doing really well.

So Slamdance, First Run Features, and yeah, once we got into Slamdance it was like people were interested, and then we played-

... pod today.

We have Giselle Bonilla, who received her MFA in directing from AFI, the American Film Institute, here in Los Angeles.

Um, her thesis film, The Bullfighter, won the Student Directors Guild of America Grand Prize Award and received special mention for Best Comedy in, at the Palm Springs Shorts Fest.

We screened The Bullfighter in, I think, our second year of doing Not Your Daddy's Films.

Yeah.

[laughs] I love that.

So it's no surprise that Giselle is also a Latino Film Institute and Netflix Inclusion fellow, Telluride, Telluride, I can speak English, Telluride Film Lab fellow, and an alum of the Sundance, uh, Institute as an Ignite and Adobe fellow.

Her feature directorial debut, The Musical, premiered in US Dramatic Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, and is based on a short of the same title that we also screened in 2025, I believe.

Um.

Yeah, we talked about it last year, but, you know, one of the most preeminent film festivals in the world, in the country, is Sundance, and that started as Robert Redford starting a lab, a director's lab.

And then he purchased, I believe it was called the USA Film Festival at the time, and turned that into the Sundance Film Festival.

So he started from helping filmmakers at the inception.

That was his inflection point.

If you wanna do more than schlock and go for something super more ambitious, I think you definitely could do that.

Actually, I have a question for you, Ryan.

As someone with a Sundance background, if you were a filmmaker today looking to launch a career, and say you liked obsession and like horror- and are thinking about maybe doing anything else or specifically horror, what do you think would be a better avenue? Pitching, winning the pitch contest at Fantastic Fest, or getting in, like, the Sundance Writer Lab to workshop a project? Do you think one is kind of becoming, they're becoming equal at this point, or you think the classic kind of path there is better?

And we mentioned the leak from the Sundance Film Festival.

Yeah.

So there is a program called the Sundance Institute.

I had no idea it existed back in 1997.

I don't even know about it because Samantha and her partner were one of the frontrunners in the Sundance Institute this past year.

Unfortunately, they didn't make it.

Rigged.

Yeah.

Right.

Or if you were to overtly express—you can't get into the Sundance Institute if you express a conservative value.

You can't get into Columbia Film School if you say you want to make—if your screenplays you submit are touting conservative values.

You can't get into Iowa Writers Workshop.

Hey, that's me.

All right, Brad, we're here to talk about a pretty small film called The Musical that you and I saw at Sundance and we both really enjoyed it.

And you had a chance to speak with the director of the movie and the writer of the film as well.

So we're going to play that interview in a little bit.

Why don't you remind people what the premise of this is? Because I imagine they probably didn't see a trailer for it because it comes from a pretty small distribution company, I think, that doesn't necessarily have a huge budget for marketing.

So if people are wondering what the musical is all about, what would you say to them?

So here's what I'm going to say, because if you didn't hear our Sundance episode where I believe we kind of gave away what the central premise is, this time I'm going to avoid it because now that I've seen the official marketing, there's a trailer out there, they intentionally did not reveal what the main thrust of the movie is as far as at least the dark joke at the center of it.

So what I'll say about the movie is it follows Will Brill, who plays this middle school theater teacher who has become frustrated in his life because he doesn't like his job.