Star Turn
Duo gets Sundance invite with sci-fi short film
By Jessica Laskey
Photography by Aniko Kiezel
May 2025
When the call came saying Roberto Fatal’s short film “En Memoria” had been accepted to the 2025 Sundance Film Festival out of 8,000 submissions, Fatal almost crashed the car.
Back home in Land Park, Fatal told co-writer and girlfriend Ali Meyers-Ohki. Then they called the cast and crew.
It was a dream come true for the team that brought “En Memoria” to reality.
“I’ve been in love with movies and sci-fi since I was a child,” Fatal says. “But being queer, in the closet, Latino and mixed Indigenous, I didn’t see a lot of my community in sci-fi, which scared me a little bit. I’d think, Oh, my God, I think this means we don’t make it to the future!
“Then I’d see LeVar Burton (an actor from Sacramento) and felt real hope. I knew that if I could ever make movies, I would make sci-fi stories for everyone.”
The film began as a pandemic writing project for Fatal and Meyers-Ohki. The story involves a mother struggling to finish her daughter’s quinceañera dress in a dystopian future. Fatal and Myers-Ohki submitted their work to a sci-fi short story contest on Burton’s podcast.
The story made it to the top 10 in Burton’s competition, which sparked the authors to transform the project into a film. The transition from story to movie made sense, given Fatal’s job as an assistant professor of theater arts and film at Sacramento City College.
When Fatal and Meyers-Ohki geared up to produce the film, “we had really candid conversations about what we could self-fund and other sources of investment,” Fatal says. “The city of Sacramento came through with $15,000 (from the Innovation and Growth Fund). We couldn’t have made this without being here. There’s good support here for film and media arts, especially from film commissioner Jennifer West.”
With funding secured, the duo moved onto production. “En Memoria” was praised at Sundance for its diverse cast and crew—63% identify as nonbinary, transgender or cisgender women; 30% as disabled; and 73% as Black, Indigenous and people of color. But that wasn’t intentional.
“We’re queer and trans people of color,” Fatal says. “It’s just who our friends are. We’re not trying to check boxes, we just want to write about ourselves. The family you see onscreen is an extension of what Ali’s and my family could look like in the future.
“People can smell when diversity in cinema is forced. Nobody’s asking for that representation. And who pays the price for pandering? Our community. There’s a difference between tokenization and actual representation.”
In January, Fatal, Meyers-Ohki and cast and crew members traveled to Utah for Sundance. Fatal participated in the five-day Sundance Screenwriters Lab.
“The lab kicked my ass,” Fatal says. “But I had incredible mentors who looked at everything from every angle. Everybody’s dream is to get into Sundance, but they don’t tell you how much freaking work it takes. But when you get there, you get it. It’s wild. It does actually change your life.”
After the festival, Meyers-Ohki returned to fiction writing and work on a master’s degree. Fatal is focused on producing another screenplay, “Electric Homies.”
“Even though I’m wigged out by the attention, I feel so glad to get accolades if that allows me to kick the door open for my students,” Fatal says.
For information, visit robertofatal.com and @roberto_fatal, @alimowrites and @en.memoria.film on Instagram.
Jessica Laskey can be reached at jessrlaskey@gmail.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
