JoyDrops champions awards-eligible documentary shorts about joy, a counterweight to a category often dominated by tragedy. Good News Network has partnered with JoyDrops to spotlight these films and talk with the filmmakers behind them.
In 1970, an elementary school teacher named Pat Palinkas walked onto the field for the Orlando Panthers and became the first woman to play professional football. She made national headlines. Then, almost as quickly, the world forgot.
More than five decades later, filmmaker Ashley Brandon is making sure her story gets told—with a little help from Barbie.
“Panther Pat,” Brandon’s 12-minute documentary, pairs interviews with Palinkas and archival material with scenes staged using dolls, toys and stop-motion animation. The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Short at the 2026 Slamdance Film Festival, screened at Tribeca, and is Oscar-qualified. Eli Manning and Robin Roberts recently joined as executive producers.
A footnote that became a film
Brandon, who is also an associate professor of film, television and media arts at Quinnipiac University, grew up surrounded by the game. “I’m obsessed with football. It’s the number one sport I follow,” she says. “I grew up around it because my dad, my whole life, has been a football coach.”
But she was never allowed on a team. “I got to play backyard football with the boys and the other coaches’ sons, but that was really as far as it went,” she says.
She always knew she wanted to make a football movie. The subject found her after she moved to Connecticut, when she picked up a used book on the history of football in the state. It profiled the semi-pro Bridgeport Jets, the team Palinkas faced in her first game. Her history-making moment got a single passing sentence near the end.
“It said nothing else,” Brandon says. “But I was like, whoa, that’s the most interesting thing in this entire, kind of boring book.”
Research led her to Palinkas, then living in Clearwater, Florida. Instead of calling, the filmmakers wrote her a letter. “We felt like it would be more genuine,” Brandon says. Palinkas wrote back, and work began in 2021.
When the archive runs out, grab the dolls
The film’s signature look came about almost by accident. The filmmakers quickly realized there was not a lot of film or photos to illustrate Palinkas’s stories.
“This was my first film that incorporates archival, and it’s really important before you start an archival movie that you make sure there’s an archive,” Brandon says.
The fix came from Palinkas herself. Going back through her interviews, the filmmakers kept returning to something she’d said about growing up: when she wanted to play football, she was told that girls play with dolls.
“We don’t really have the budget to hire actors and make it look like the ’70s and fill a stadium,” Brandon says. “But I think we have it in the budget to buy some Barbies and dolls.”
What started as a last resort became the heart of the film. “We’re so happy that we were so naive,” she says, “because it allowed us to be super creative.” The playful approach, she adds, wins over viewers “who maybe don’t love football and don’t love sports, but they love the playfulness of the dolls.”
It was new territory for the director, too. “I was never the doll girl,” she says. “I finally got into it in my 30s.”
A teacher’s story, made for young audiences
Palinkas died in the summer of 2025, months before the film was completed. “It’s one of the things that we regret the most, that we weren’t able to get it finished in time,” Brandon says. “But I know that she was waiting for years for this story to get out there.”
Her family has embraced the film. They have long been amazed that more people don’t know what their mother accomplished, Brandon says. And the dolls suit a woman who spent her career teaching elementary school. “She was painting a picture in front of you,” Brandon says of Palinkas’s storytelling. The toys, she believes, will help Pat reach the young audiences she always loved teaching.
Throughout the film, a small doll sits watching TV as women appear on screen as players, coaches, referees and fans. “Ultimately, the goal is to see themselves represented,” Brandon says. “You can do it. Pat did it, so of course you can do it too.”
Not every short doc has to be a “short sad”
“Panther Pat” is part of the JoyDrops slate, a collection of documentary shorts that pushes back on the idea, joked about by Oscars host Conan O’Brien, that the category often focuses on tragedy.
Brandon has no quarrel with serious films. “We love those stories that are sad and super serious. They’re very important,” she says. “But it’s also really important to make sure that we’re telling stories of joy as well, because that makes the world a better place. And even in the hardest of times, there are still very joyful things to celebrate.”
For her, short documentaries can be “a really radical space,” a form with no fixed rules. “I’ve always really gotten a lot of joy from surprising people,” she says. “If I wasn’t working in documentaries, I wanted to design roller coasters.”
