"I haven't been doing this for very long," admits fledgling filmmaker Tara Autovino.

It's technically not beginner's luck if your second film gets accepted into the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. And by the time you read this, the Webster-born, Ontario-bred Autovino will be caught up in the whirlwind of screenings, parties, and other industry hobnobbings that defines filmdom's trek to the mountains of Utah each January. Autovino, who currently studies moviemaking at New York University, wrote and directed a short film called "For a Swim With the Fish," which features her 9-year-old daughter, Tali, as a young Floridian who makes a trip to the Gulf of Mexico believing that her late mother, who worked as a water-park mermaid, has gone to live there.

So filmmaking must have been a lifelong dream, right? "Absolutely not," Autovino says, recalling a circuitous route to NYU that followed semesters at RIT and MCC as well as philosophy studies at New York's Hunter College. Only about a third of the applicants to Autovino's program at NYU film school have a background in cinema, though. Autovino attributes her growing grasp of the medium to all the movie-watching she does in the evenings as a single mom, citing auteurs like John Cassavetes, Werner Herzog, Claire Denis, and especially Hal Hartley as influences.

"For a Swim With the Fish" will screen five times before Sundance draws to a close on January 28. Then Autovino will take her film to the Berlinale Talent Campus in February and South by Southwest in March before moving to Georgia to resume work on her thesis project, a documentary about Christian wrestlers in the South.

The Sundance Film Festival is streaming some of this year's short submissions from its website for free: festival.sundance.org/2007.