A secluded session between a therapist and an at-risk patient.

Syncing Sinking, directed by Estevan Padilla, is an intimate drama that unfolds within the confines of a single therapy session, where words carry weight and silence speaks volumes. Set in a secluded space, the film centers on the delicate exchange between a therapist and an at-risk patient, as both navigate a conversation charged with vulnerability, tension, and unspoken truths.

Stripped down to its emotional core, Syncing Sinking relies on performance and atmosphere to draw the audience into a deeply human moment of connection. As the session progresses, the boundaries between professional distance and personal involvement begin to blur, revealing the quiet complexities of care, responsibility, and the fragile act of reaching out before it’s too late.

Syncing Sinking centers on a secluded session between a therapist and an at-risk patient. What first sparked this story, and what made you want to explore it in such an intimate setting?

The idea came directly from my very first guided session. Having experienced firsthand what a successful session feels like, it became pretty easy to see all the ways one could go wrong.
There was also something about the power dynamic between a “healer” and a client that I really wanted to dig into. It’s such an imbalanced relationship, and it requires an enormous amount of trust to work. At the time, I was working with someone who knew so much about me that I paradoxically knew almost nothing about them and that made me trepidatious going into the experience. On top of that, I’d read a lot about facilitators who had taken advantage of clients while they were in vulnerable states. All of that was sitting with me. On top of that, adding a layer of ambiguity around the therapist’s intentions and the true depth of their arrangement made the story feel even richer to me. Thankfully, I’ve only had positive life changing experiences that were done safely and with a trusted practitioner. Just want that to be known!
Also, I’ve seen so many interpretations of the psychedelic experience on film that boardered on parody, with the exception of a few. We wanted to make something that felt emotionally resonant and with hi-fidelity replications.

You come from a documentary background. What felt different — or liberating — about stepping into a more imaginative, genre-flexible approach with this film?

I’m genuinely so grateful for the opportunities and the people the doc world has brought into my life. But there’s an inherent creative limitation to it. At the end of the day, you’re helping someone else tell their own story or creating something topical. Your personal voice mostly lives in how you choose to shape and shoot things, which is meaningful, but also constraining.
With this film I finally felt free to do something strange, personal, and was fully aligned with my own tastes. That said, my doc background definitely prepared me in ways I didn’t fully anticipate, especially when it came to staying present and improvising on the day through numerous obstacles. It was a tough shoot.

You’ve described the film as loosely inspired by your own mental health journey. How did you decide what to draw from personally, and what to transform into something purely cinematic?

It all started with that first session. It was an incredibly vulnerable experience, and that vulnerability became the emotional core. My co-writer and collaborator, Idrees and I were both keen to pull from our own respective experiences with guided work, but we were intentional about what that meant. We didn’t want to mine specific anecdotes from our personal histories. Instead, we wanted to capture the feelings: the catharsis, the absurdity, the fear, the awe. We also wanted to highlight the use case of the work to help with grief, depression and PTSD.

The film is immersive and detail-oriented. What were the “rules” of the experience for you — what did you want the audience to feel in their body as much as in their mind?

I wanted to play with POV, and to move fluidly between a subjective and an objective camera with subtle differences. This was done with our lensing choices, color grade, sound design and intensity of the vfx. The idea was that the audience would feel the instability of the experience and also gauge the threshold of each character’s tolerance to the medicine. A guided experience isn’t just psychological, it’s deeply sensorial, and I wanted the film to honor all those aspects.

You mention developing a visual language that can translate from micro-budget work to a larger feature. What did you learn here about scaling style without losing intimacy?

I learned an enormous amount from making this short. I went into it with a kind of brazen confidence that it would all come together the way I envisioned and honestly that conviction helped, even when things were challenging. One of the main reasons I needed to make it was to prove the concept to myself as much as anyone else and as I develop my current feature. I feel like we have an amazing foundation to build off of, but we’ll have a bigger sandbox to play in. I’m really excited about it.

The film is described as genre-defying, colorful, grounded, and quietly cathartic — which is a tricky balance. How did you calibrate tone so it never tips too far into abstraction or too far into realism?

I wanted to create a sustained sense of unease without ever tipping into horror. The thing about psychedelic experiences is that they’re temperamental, in that they can move very quickly from funny to terrifying to genuinely awe-inspiring within seconds. Trying to honor that emotional range in a way that felt grounded was one of the hardest tonal challenges of the film. There was definitely a temptation to push further into abstraction and “trippiness”, but I kept coming back to the feeling. As long as the emotion was real, the stranger elements could coexist with the grounded ones.

Sound seems central to how the film should be experienced. How did you and your team design the sonic world — and what should viewers listen for when watching with headphones?

A lot of what I was working from was from memory and instinct, and having someone who could translate that into something concrete was invaluable.
I have to give a lot of credit to my VFX artist, Loka and my sound designer, Adam Myatt, for helping me articulate what I was going for sonically and how we could keep it as close to the real experience without parodizing. It’s a slippery slope to want to go too far out and abstract, but we made sure to stay restrained.

With only a few characters and a contained space, performance becomes everything. How did you work with your actors to build trust and achieve that kind of emotional precision?

With Idrees specifically, who I also co-wrote the film with, I chose to collaborate with not only because he’s a great performer, but he also has a deep, personal understanding of what it means to be guided. That wasn’t something I wanted to explain or direct around; I wanted to empower him to draw from his own experience and trust his instincts for his performance. That gave me a lot of confidence in him. I didn’t have to worry about him going too overboard and trusting that he knew intuitively what to react to. I tried to be conscious of not taking the wheel too much. The best thing I could do as a director in those moments was create the conditions for something real to happen, and then get out of the way. Same with Natalia, who plays the guide. I won’t say too much, but up until the day before shooting she was “uninitiated” in psychedelics and she brought that experience to the very next day on set. I’d never ask that of anyone, but it definitely helped.

What are the books, podcasts, or even YouTube channels that you recommend young filmmakers get their hands on?

Books
Transcendental style in film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer by Paul Shrader
Flicker by Theodore Roszak
The Three Wells of Screenwriting by Matthew Kalil
Catching the Big Fish by David Lynch

Youtube Channels
Thomas Flight – Great video essays. He has a deep well of film knowledge and history.
Everyframe a Painting – Another resource of beautiful film essays.
Studiobinder – A good all around practical resource and refresher
Old Dick Cavett interviews – Not directly film related, but a lot of great interviews with
Filmmakers, artists and thinkers of the 60s/70s.

Can you share some of your favorite short films you’ve seen lately?

The Truck by Liz Rao
Synthesize Me by Bear Dame
Mondegreen by Linda Mai Green
What the Heck is Going On by Greg Rubner
Out for Delivery by Chelsea Christer
Hatchlings by Jahmil Eady
Honeypot by Rick Darge