Spotlight: Jayme Coveliers (Unlimited, Forever and Ever, No Matter What)

September 12, 2026

Filmmaker Spotlight

Unlimited, Forever and Ever, No Matter What

Jayme Coveliers · USA · 13 min

What led you to creating Unlimited, Forever and Ever, No Matter What?

My mother is one of the most lovable people I’ve ever met… And also one of the most frustrating. She’s goofy and vibrant, but also stubborn, forgetful, and determined to a fault. She used to be an athlete and P.E. teacher where her body was her instrument. After she was rear-ended, everything changed. The same body that once made her feel free became a source of pain and isolation, a body in which she now feels trapped in. Yet, she never stopped pushing. She still doesn’t.

That mix of vibrancy and stubbornness was hard to put into words. Every time I sat down to write her, I’d get stuck. She isn’t someone you can reduce to a few character traits. She’s constantly in contradiction: warm and furious, sharp and soft, childlike and commanding. I kept rewriting until I realized what I needed wasn’t an actress to play her, but her. And, somehow, she said yes.

Visually, I wanted to explore how environments change when you live in pain. In the film, Maggie limps down a hallway that stretches towards infinity and feels as though she’s walking on ice that she could crack through at any moment. The stairs to her office stretch upwards like a mountain that feels dizzyingly high. That’s what chronic pain does: it warps the scale of our lives. Simple things become seemingly insurmountable.

This film is a love letter to my mom and the strength and perseverance she’s had my entire life. I hope she is able to inspire us all to face the mountains we think we are not capable of climbing.

The stairs to her office stretch upwards like a mountain that feels dizzyingly high. That’s what chronic pain does: it warps the scale of our lives.

What were some inspirations going into the creative process?

I was pulling from neorealist filmmakers like François Truffaut, Abbas Kiarostami, Sean Baker, and Chloe Zhao. A lot of other techniques I was using had to fall to the wayside as I realized they were too theatrical. I ended up doing everything to highlight the performance and bring it front and center.

Tell us what you hope the audience gets from Unlimited, Forever and Ever, No Matter What and why is a story like this important to tell?

I hope that they empathize with everyone on screen and sees themselves in every character in the film to some regard. All of us eventually become parents to our parents and carry their weight.

I hope the audience is able to view the world through the eyes of someone living with a disability or chronic pain. A set of stairs doesn’t just become a set of stairs when you’re counting down how many steps you know you can take in a day, particularly when you live with an invisible disability. If our audience can leaving not judging someone for taking the elevator or walking slow or makes them think twice about a set of stairs they climb every day, I think it’d be a successful film.

How did you become a filmmaker?

I started doing theater when I was very young and soon found my way into sketch comedy and improv. Not entirely satiated, I began creating more off the stage and began to involve friends and other actors. Ultimately, I cast them more and more until I was almost entirely behind the camera and they were in front. I became infatuated with filmmakers like Spielberg and Hitchcock and my hunger to learn more grew and grew. I absorbed everything I could off YouTube and the internet. As I kept going, I began to meld together my improv background with my filmmaking and melding together the two. Now, my films combine both and are chasing a soft, human, naturalistic quality.

Film	Unlimited, Forever and Ever, No Matter What
Director	Jayme Coveliers
Section	Narrative Shorts
Shorts Program	Friends Along The Way
Runtime	13 min
Screening	Sat 26 Sep, 12:00 pm