Because of her background as a stripper, Lindsey Normington said she usually doesn’t get asked to play roles like the virginal Latter-day Saint bride she portrays in “Together Forever.”
“I tend to play characters that are very gritty,” Normington said in an interview ahead of the short film, which was scheduled to premiere Saturday in Park City at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
Normington chalks that up to her eight years working as a stripper while starting her acting career. In her biggest film role, she played a stripper named Diamond, a co-worker of Mikey Madison’s title character in the Oscar-winning “Anora.”
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Her part in “Together Forever,” she said, “was just so far on the other side of the spectrum: a girl who’s really innocent and sexually inexperienced and hopeful. It was a thrill to me that somebody [thought] I could play a role like that — that somebody saw something of that in me.”
In the 14-minute short, Normington’s character, Sydney, is in a hotel room bathroom, putting on her lingerie for her new husband, Caleb (Samuel Sylvester), for what appears to be their first sexual encounter. Caleb is even more nervous and distracted by thoughts of the hunky guy who worked as a DJ at their wedding reception.
What follows is a clumsy, sweet and ultimately intimate night involving temple garments and something called “roping” — a practice based on intimate activities young unmarried couples do when they’re technically trying to maintain their virginity.
Writer-director Gregory Barnes said he started on “Together Forever” when a friend suggested he apply for a short-film contest, with the theme “tell us your love story.” The contest was sponsored by Kodak, the film company, and Neon, which tied the love story idea to the movie it was marketing at the time: “Anora.” Sean Baker, the writer and director of “Anora,” curated the contest, choosing 10 finalists out of more than 2,000 script submissions.
(Elena Karaytcheva | Sundance Institute) Gregory Barnes, director of "Together Forever," a short film playing at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
“I was just able to copy-paste something very quickly, and, thank God, I did, because I was fortunate enough to get it,” Barnes said. Winning the contest gave Barnes access to equipment, as well as Kodak film, which, he said, “gave the project a lot of momentum.”
Barnes had worked with Normington on a different project, a semidocumentary short film that’s also premiering at Sundance this year, “Going Sane: The Rise and Fall of the Center for Feeling Therapy.” Normington said that when he approached her for his film, he said, “I wrote this with you in mind.”
“I was kind of shocked,” she said, “that anybody would write something like that with me in mind.”
Sylvester had starred in Barnes’ previous short, “The Touch of the Master’s Hand,” which won an award at the virtual-only 2021 Sundance Film Festival. (In his videotaped acceptance speech that year, Barnes held a handkerchief aloft in front of the Los Angeles Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, performing a ritual called the “Hosanna Shout.”) In that film, Sylvester played a Latter-day Saint missionary who makes a startling, and humorous, confession to his mission president.
Sylvester said he and Barnes kept in touch since that film, and the filmmaker asked if he would be interested in appearing in another short. Sylvester doesn’t consider himself an actor — he’s in graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin, studying cultural history and experimental film — but he accepted.
(Fidel Ruiz-Healy | The American Standard Film Co.) Lindsey Normington plays a Latter-day Saint bride on her wedding day in writer-director Gregory Barnes' short film, "Together Forever," which is scheduled to premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
‘Figuring out intimacy’
Barnes said the story was inspired by his days growing up in the Latter-day Saint faith in Chicago. The mother of Barnes’ best friend was president of the women’s Relief Society in their congregation, he said, “so I had top-shelf gossip at my fingertips.”
“She would start to tell us these, really, horror stories of Mormon wedding nights,” Barnes said. “What she was really doing was giving us a very gentle sex education. I just loved these little stories of Mormons figuring out intimacy on their wedding night. … There’s no point of reference. When you’re in your honeymoon suite, you’re really just having to, one by one, put these pieces together and invent what sex is to you.”
Growing up queer in the Latter-day Saint faith, as Barnes did, complicated things further, he said.
“You can never make the other person happy because you’re different, or … because it’s not actually what you want,” Barnes said. “So you end up sort of hating yourself, or you end up sort of sacrificing yourself.”
That’s what Caleb eventually learns, Barnes said, “that he can imagine that there maybe is another way of being, and he can imagine another way out, another sort of relationship. That’s where the little bit of hope in the film comes from.”
In the short, Sydney and Caleb revert to what a young Latter-day Saint couple might do before marriage to be intimate without crossing the line of losing one’s virginity. The scene reflects how inexperienced couples, Barnes said, often play a “purity culture game” that pits belief against hormones.
“The language that you use when you go to Sunday school [says] ‘Stay far from the line. Don’t even get close to the line,’” Barnes said. “If you’re a young person listening, and you’re, like, “Oh, so there is a line.’ … And what ends up happening with these loopholes is they create these moments of intimacy that are way kinkier than if people just had vanilla sex. … It creates something that I honestly think is very erotic and very cinematic.”
Normington said her knowledge of the Latter-day Saint faith was “pretty limited” before working on the film. She said Barnes shared some online resources — including an Instagram account that was “a whole page about wives of men who are addicted to porn,” and a YouTube dating show called “Provo’s Most Eligible.”
“There’s obviously a lot of stereotypes about Mormonism,” Normington said. “I was very pleased to have so many resources of people who are Mormon and living very differently, and [also of] people who would be living very similarly to Sydney.”
Sylvester said Barnes gave him two bits of instruction to prepare to play Caleb. “The first is that I should read up on the history of the church, like how you’re supposed to live when you’re part of the church,” he said. The other, he added, was to “be yourself.”
Showing temple garments
The choice to show Sydney and Caleb in temple garments, Barnes said, was “definitely a very delicate thing.”
On the one hand, he said, “what’s important to me is depicting honestly what it’s like to be Mormon,” and garments are “a thing that all LDS people have.” At the same time, he said, “we don’t show any of the [sacred] symbols or signs on the garments.”
Barnes said that “some girls at wedding showers will get Victoria’s Secret lingerie, and that opens a whole [line of questions]: ‘OK, so am I going to wear this? Or am I going to wear my garments? Is our wedding night going to be an embrace of the sensuality and the spirituality of sex, or is it going to be a strictly spiritual ritualistic act?’”
Normington said Sydney enters the honeymoon suite not realizing that her new husband is closeted, so wearing lingerie “is so hopeful because it’s so basic.” Adding the garments to the equation, she said, shows “the tension between what she wants and what is religiously, culturally acceptable. Then, what he’s asking for is kind of a misdirect, just to elongate not having to go that far with her.”
With “Together Forever” having its premiere at Sundance, Barnes said his next step is a feature film, a story about two brothers and a father. Again, his background growing up queer in the Latter-day Saint faith will inspire him.
“Mormonism is like an artesian well for creativity,” Barnes said. “I can’t just turn it off.”
Note to readers • “Together Forever” will screen as part of Short Film Program 2 at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It’s scheduled to screen at the following times and theaters: Saturday, Jan. 24, 3:15 p.m., at The Yarrow in Park City; Wednesday, Jan. 28, 3 p.m., Broadway Centre Cinemas 3, Salt Lake City; Thursday, Jan. 29, 10:20 a.m., Redstone 3, Park City; and Friday, Jan. 30, 10 a.m., Holiday Village Cinemas 2, Park City. The program will be available on the festival’s online portal, Thursday through Sunday, Jan. 29 to Feb. 1.