Roundtable: My Short Film’s Long Journey to Sundance with Olive Nwosu (Egungun), William David Caballero (Chilly and Milly) and Sky Hopinka (Kicking the Clouds)

Liz Nord is a documentarian, journalist, and multi-platform producer who has created and shown work across the globe. She is currently Director of Content here at Sundance Collab, where she develops resources in multiple formats and featuring top-tier industry talent for a global cohort of emerging filmmakers. She is also creator and editor of Sundance's The Muse, a biweekly journal for Screenwriters and Storytellers.

Previously, she served as the Editor-in-Chief and Lead Producer at No Film School, the world’s largest online filmmaking community, where she also co-hosted the popular Indie Film Weekly podcast. Her projects have included Emmy-winning election coverage for MTV News and a documentary for Wyclef Jean's NGO, Yele Haiti. Her film, JERICHO’S ECHO: PUNK ROCK IN THE HOLY LAND, a critically acclaimed documentary about rebellious young Israeli musicians, screened at over 100 festivals and venues worldwide.

In her multi-platform work, she partnered with transmedia pioneer Lance Weiler as director of Lyka's Adventure Labs, experiential science and tech workshops for elementary school students.

Liz is also an active member of Film Fatales, and has spoken and written extensively on media-related topics, notably as a TEDx speaker and as a multiple-time SXSW presenter. She enjoys traveling, street photography, cooking and trying new foods, outdoor dance parties, and terrible puns.

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, CA, Portland, OR, and Milwaukee, WI. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non-fictional forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and teaches at Bard College.

His work has played at various festivals including ImagineNATIVE Media + Arts Festival, Images, Wavelengths, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Sundance, and Projections. His work was a part of the 2016 Wisconsin Triennial and the 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2018 FRONT Triennial. He was a guest curator at the 2019 Whitney Biennial and was a part of Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou. He was awarded jury prizes at the Onion City Film Festival, the More with Less Award at the 2016 Images Festival, the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New Cinema Award at the Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship for Individual Artists in the Emerging artist category for 2018. He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018-2019 and Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, and is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow.

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Olive Nwosu is an award-winning screenwriter and director living in London. Olive graduated with an MFA in Filmmaking from Columbia University School of the Arts where she received a BAFTA Pigott 2020 Scholarship and was named 2020 Alex Sichel Fellow for a Female Filmmaker demonstrating promise. Olive won the Zaki Gordon Memorial Award for Excellence in Screenwriting, and the James Ponsoldt Award for Best Director in her graduating year.

She has written and directed two short films. TROUBLEMAKER, 2019, played at film festivals around the world and was acquired by Dedza Films and Kino Lorber. It is the first Igbo-language film on the Criterion Channel.

EGÚNGÚN (MASQUERADE), 2021, was financed by the British Film Institute and British Council as part of their More Films For Freedom Programme. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2021, screened at Sundance 2022, won Best Short Film at Hamptons International Film Festival and Aspen ShortsFest, amongst others. The film was nominated for the Best British Short Film at the 2021 British Independent Film Awards and is now available on the Criterion Channel.

Olive is a 2022 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow, a 2022 TIFF Filmmaker Lab Fellow, the first recipient of the TIFF Share Her Journey Fellowship in honour of Viola Desmond, and one of four ‘African Promises’ directors selected by the Institute Francais. In 2023, she received the Sundance NHK Award, presented each year to one filmmaker on the basis of his/her past work (feature film, short film, television drama, music video, or commercial) and the script for their next feature film project.

She is currently in development on feature projects with Film4, the BBC, and Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Her work is informed by the intersectional nature of her life across multiple continents and identities. Her mission is to tell urgent, cinematic, African-centred stories. 

William D. Caballero is a Puerto Rican-American, queer filmmaker. Born in the housing projects of Brooklyn, NY, and raised in a trailer in his grandparent's backyard in Fayetteville, NC, his autobiographical animated documentary shorts have debuted at the 2017 and 2022 Sundance Film Festivals. His work features an innovative blend of animation and live action, usually combined with audio interviews from underrepresented and marginalized peoples. He is a 2001 Gates Millennium Scholar, 2017 Sundance New Voices Lab Fellow, 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, 2021 Creative Capital Awardee, 2022 Sundance Documentary Humanities Fellow, and 2024 Webby Award winner for Best Art Direction.