Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake): Everything Eats and Is Eaten
by Nirica S.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
We don’t live our lives alone, but constantly in concert with hundreds and thousands of strangers—fellow passengers on a bus, people we pass on the street, the ones we read about in the newspaper. It’s easy to forget that in a world that encourages insularity. But every so often, something comes along to remind us of the bigger patchwork of our lives, like Sierra Falconer’s luminous debut feature, Sunfish (& Other Stories on Green Lake) (2025).
Through four vignettes, we meet four people living on Green Lake, Northern Michigan—some longtime residents, and others just visitors. These characters have nothing in common except the lake they live on, a location that underscores their stories, a vivid and integral part of their lives. We only meet each of them for a short while—a few days, a week—before we are whisked along to some other part of the lake, into another life.
In the titular story, there is an almost idyllic languidness to the lake. A couple spends their days watching the lake from the comfort of their home through their binoculars in search of a baby loon (that they affectionately call a “loonlet”). Their routine is interrupted when Lu (Maren Heary), their granddaughter, shows up unexpectedly, left there on the heels of her mother’s shotgun wedding. For Lu, life at the lake is oppressively relaxed and she feels abandoned and unmoored, calling her mother every day and only reaching her voicemail. Her discovery of two things—her grandfather’s sailboat, and the loonlet—bring Lu, and us, closer to the lake. Heary plays Lu with a determined tenacity as she learns how to sail, tipped constantly overboard, and finds a purpose to her days. “The lake is yours,” her grandfather tells her, and we watch as she takes ownership.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute
From her spot on the lake, Lu watches the land idly through her binoculars. She zeroes in on the busy spot towards the north of the lake, where students attend a prestigious music camp. Before we can blink, the film shifts focus to Jun (Jim Kaplan), an Asian American boy competing for first chair in the second story, “Music Camp.” Pushed forward by his overbearing mother, his own loneliness, and the pressure to succeed, Jun’s days at the lake are different from Lu’s—marked not by languidness, but by something harsher, like the choppy waves of the lake. The baton passes to the third story, “Two Hearted,” when its protagonist, Annie, drives past Jun on the road. A mother to a three-year-old, Annie (Karsen Liotta) impulsively joins a fisherman (Domonic Bogart) on a quest for the catch of a lifetime: a fish “as big as a whale.” News of this quest eventually marks our way into the fourth and final story, “Resident Bird,” where two sisters (Tenley Kellogg and Emily Hall) who run a family-owned bed-and-breakfast come across the story in the local paper. Despite being the setting for all these stories, the lake means different things to different characters. For Lu, it’s an opportunity to find herself; for Annie, who’s lived her whole life on the lake, it’s a “black hole” she cannot escape.
Falconer turns a keen eye to each of these characters’ lives, which are full of rich, lived-in detail. From afar, we watch Lu berate a loon for abandoning her loonlet: “You’re all she has!” she tells her, and we feel the weight of those unanswered phone calls. In “Resident Bird,” the sisters teach their new guests a game of cards with easy camaraderie, but the story is bittersweet with the knowledge that the older sister leaves for college in a few days. And always, before we get too comfortable in any of these lives, Falconer whisks us away and into another, reminding us that all we’re getting is a tiny glimpse into a larger, vivid reality.
Sunfish is a glimpse into lake life, a life lived by the rhythms of the water, which, by turns, can be languid and peaceful or choppy and unpredictable; the surface of which can be navigable, while its depths hold unfathomable unknowns. And which, above all, can feel as familiar and well-worn as home. I found myself especially drawn in by the soundscape—the sound of the loon above the lapping of the waves, Jun’s violin, the strings and harmonicas of its folk soundtrack. At one point, as the camera moves over the lake, Adrianne Lenker’s “ingydar” plays: “Everything eats and is eaten, time is fed.” Sunfish is a reminder of interconnectedness and circularity, of the places that precede us and stay long after we’ve gone, and the lives that we live in those places, however briefly.
Courtesy of Sundance Institute