Entry: 2026 SUNDANCE INSTITUTE IGNITE X ADOBE FELLOWSHIP

Waiting for Vera

Creator: Stephen Whipple
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Waiting for Vera
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Waiting for Vera

About this Video

Logline: A lone, elderly oil painter prepares to begin a new painting. After readying his materials, he waits for a final, key ingredient.

My aim for this film was hope without sentimentality. I wanted to make a film that acknowledges the ruptured reality we live in which often feels bleak, while at the same time providing some amount of levity. I didn't want to negate how irreparable life so often feels, but I also didn't want to overlook the beauty that has the ability to recenter us when everything around us seems worth despairing over.

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Creator

Stephen Whipple

Creator

Stephen Whipple is a Chicago-based writer and director. Born and raised in Vermont, Whipple spent a decade after high school vagabonding around North America, then situated himself in the midwest for seminarian studies, merging his two beloved spheres, theology and cinema. After schooling, he transitioned into full-time film work swiftly, working in lighting and camera support on numerous commercial television and feature film sets. As a director, his first short film, Peckish, won the Best First-Time Filmmaker Award at Cannes World Film Festival 2023; in August 2024, he and his core collaborators completed his second short film, Waiting for Vera. Whipple is currently developing his first feature film, Idle Hours, a slow-burning, contemporary ghost story set in rural New England. His writing and filmmaking desires to be suggestive over explicative, contemplative, ritualistic, quietly apocalyptic, and religiously archetypal.

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