Award-winning filmmaker Lara Everly arrives at the 2026 Tribeca Festival with not one, but two essential short films, RECONSTRUCTING CHARLIE and SELAH, announcing her as one of the festival’s most exciting and emotionally fearless new voices. Both films are deeply rooted in female experience, yet they approach their subjects with radically different textures and tones, revealing a filmmaker with remarkable range, confidence, and compassion.
At the center of Everly’s filmmaking is an unwavering commitment to women navigating impossible situations with humor, resilience, and agency. Whether confronting illness or autonomy, her characters are never reduced to symbols of suffering. Instead, they are messy, funny, impulsive, vulnerable, and defiantly alive.
RECONSTRUCTING CHARLIE may be the more overtly emotional of the two works, but Everly’s direction avoids sentimentality at every turn. Drawn from her own breast cancer journey, the film follows Charlie as she attempts to rebuild her life after divorce, only to be blindsided by a devastating diagnosis. Rather than framing Charlie through tragedy, Everly crafts a sharply observed portrait of survival infused with biting humor and emotional honesty.
The film’s most compelling achievement lies in how it reframes illness through the female gaze. Charlie’s relationship with her body, her sister, and her children is handled with remarkable intimacy, while the “last night out for the boobs” premise becomes both hilarious and heartbreaking. Everly understands that comedy can be a form of resistance, and her direction allows humor to coexist naturally alongside fear and grief.
What makes RECONSTRUCTING CHARLIE so affecting is its emotional specificity. Everly captures the awkwardness, exhaustion, and strange absurdities of survivorship without ever losing sight of Charlie’s humanity. The film feels lived-in and emotionally precise, balancing vulnerability with a rebellious energy that makes the character unforgettable.
In contrast, SELAH is quieter, moodier, and visually expansive, but no less emotionally potent. Anchored by breakout newcomer Birdie Silverstein, the film follows a 17-year-old girl driving from Texas to California transporting a designer puppy for cash. What begins as a seemingly simple road movie gradually reveals itself as something far more urgent, a story about bodily autonomy, secrecy, and survival.
Everly’s direction here is remarkably restrained and assured. She allows the tension to simmer beneath vast American landscapes, using silence and atmosphere as effectively as dialogue. The cinematography by Chloe Weaver is stunning, capturing both the beauty and loneliness of the open road while keeping Selah emotionally centered in every frame.
What elevates SELAH beyond a conventional coming-of-age story is Everly’s refusal to sensationalize her protagonist’s choices. Selah is neither romanticized nor judged. Instead, Everly observes her with empathy and complexity, allowing the audience to sit inside her uncertainty, fear, and determination. The result is a deeply contemporary portrait of a young woman trying to claim control over her own future in a world that constantly threatens to take it away.
Across both films, Everly demonstrates an extraordinary command of tone. Dark comedy, emotional realism, and visual elegance blend seamlessly, creating stories that feel both intimate and cinematic. Her work recalls filmmakers unafraid to confront difficult truths while still finding moments of absurdity, warmth, and hope.
Most impressively, Everly proves herself to be a filmmaker profoundly interested in women as complete human beings, flawed, complicated, resilient, and fiercely self-determining. With RECONSTRUCTING CHARLIE and SELAH, she delivers two of the most compelling female-driven stories at this year’s Tribeca lineup and firmly establishes herself as a major directing talent to watch.
For festival information and tickets to SELAH, visit Tribeca Festival Official Page for SELAH
Sarah Levy 5/5
