Bedford Park

US Dramatic Special Jury Award for Debut Feature, 2026 Sundance Film Festival
Official Selection, 2026 Busan International Film Festival

A car ride catalyzes vulnerability. A security guard wants more than what he’s been given. A daughter performs her parents’ desires. Han pulsates from opening to ending. In BEDFORD PARK, a car accident brings together Audrey, a physical therapist who returns to her childhood home to help her parents, and Eli, an ex-wrestler who’s currently attending community college, and begins a gentle yet slow-burning relationship seeping through New Jersey’s concrete cracks.

The budding dynamic between Audrey and Eli highlights the cultural blind spots and challenges that encapsulate yearning within assimilation, sacrifice, and debt. Unique to these characters are their inner worlds, and how they grapple with the gap between their desired selves and their reality while accepting mundane messiness. With no establishing shots, viewers lack information with each frame, becoming listeners to the tenderness whispering in each scene.

Part romance and part family drama, Stephanie Ahn’s feature debut BEDFORD PARK cautiously pulls its characters into roundabouts, traffic jams, and highways to deepen our ideas of love, both romantic and familial, and affirm the disarray that comes with each relationship.

– Alissa Tu