Best Live Action Short Film Nominees for the 97th Academy Awards (2025, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)
This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups to the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up is done in memory of two now-shuttered theaters that were very important to this tradition – the Nickelodeon Theatre of Santa Cruz, California (2012 and 2013) and the Regency South Coast Village of Santa Ana, California (2014-2020, 2022-2024).
If you are an American or Canadian resident interested in supporting the short film filmmakers in theaters (and you should, as very few of those who work in short films are as affluent as your big-name directors and actors), check your local participating theaters here.
Without further ado, here are the nominees for the Best Live Action Short Film at this year’s Oscars. The write-ups for this year’s nominees in Documentary Short and Animated Short are complete (see the links!). Films predominantly in a language other than English are listed with their nation(s) of origin.
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (2024, Croatia)
Fascinatingly, the one short film of the five nominees that provides the least context for audiences is the one that most justifies its short film format. Director-writer Nebojša Slijepčević’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (Čovjek koji nije mogao šutjeti in the original Croatian) dramatizes the event leading up to a massacre during the Yugoslav Wars. One winter day, a man named Dragan (Goran Bogdan) is en route by train from Belgarde (Serbia) to Bar (Montenegro). Well before their scheduled arrival, the train comes to an abrupt halt. A paramilitary group – non-uniformed, declining to identify themselves, their group, or their purpose – clamber onto the passenger cars, asking all passengers to produce identification documents at once. Dragan complies, but before the soldiers come to his compartment, the man sitting across from him, Milan (Silvio Mumelaš), fearfully admits he has no paperwork to present. Dragan gives assurances everything will be fine, but those assurances ring hollow when no one confronts a soldier aggressively questioning and later threatening Milan minutes later. Well, almost no one. Retired military officer Tomo Buzov (Dragan Mićanović) speaks up. For that, he – not Milan – will, under force, disembark the train.
The film is dedicated to Buzov, who was murdered by members of the fascist and anti-Muslim White Eagles paramilitary group during the 1993 Štrpci massacre in what is today Bosnia-Herzegovina. Slijepčević’s decision to frame this film through the eyes of a would-be hero is intriguing. The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent – qualifying for these Academy Awards by winning the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes – exemplifies the tenuous line between the morally courageous people most wish to be and those who back that aspiration up with their actions. Effective, nervy performances from the acting ensemble enliven relatively recent history. The decisions to not show, but imply, violence and to keep the camera looking away from the other passenger in the compartment makes the first shot of Tomo Buzov – which comes very late in the film – all the more startling.
The winner of Best Live Action Short at the 2024 HollyShorts Film Festival, Anuja, distributed by Netflix, is a film that bears all the marks of an inexperienced director guilty of overreach. Nine-year-old Anuja (Sajda Pathan) lives with her older sister, Palak (Ananya Shanbhag) – one assumes their parents are absent or deceased. The two work in a garment sweatshop in Delhi, under the sinister gaze of a shifty floor manager (Sushil Parwana) and the direction of the smarmy Mr. Verma (Nagesh Bhonsle). One morning, a teacher named Mr. Mishra (Gulshan Walia) asks to see Anuja – whom he hears is a mathematical genius (although we never see evidence of this). Mr. Mishra asks Anuja to take a school entrance exam, leaving an aghast Mr. Verma to dismiss his visitor. When Palak hears of this, she decides to smuggle garment scraps out of the sweatshop, turn into bags, and raise the ₹400 (roughly $4.50 in 2025’s USD) fee for the exam. Mr. Verma, however, has other plans for both sisters.
Anuja, with headline-grabbing producers including Priyanka Chopra and Mindy Kaling (not as famous: producer Guneet Monga, who produced the winner from two years ago, The Elephant Whisperers), is strangely edited (he undermines all of the scenes in which the sisters are spending time together while not working or selling bags with bizarre cuts) to go along with that signature over-polished Netflix sharpness. The film also comes dangerously close to being a commercial for the Salaam Baalak Trust, a non-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) that provides basic literacy and schooling for children in India. No question that is a noble cause, but to have Mr. Mishra essentially provide the Trust’s mission statement during his scenes and the footage of the Trust’s students watching Anuja for the first time blurs the boundaries between a narrative piece of art and a promotional piece. Anuja’s non-ending is an even stranger decision, robbing the film of an emotional catharsis – whether or not the film deserves it is another debate entirely – that it has been building towards.
I'm Not a Robot (2023, Belgium/Netherlands)
Enough! Stop it! Stop using grim covers of Radiohead’s “Creep” for movies, television, and promotional materials! The song is tired as it is, and a more daring thing to do would be to compose a piece to achieve the unsettling mood one seeks. Or just find a different song!
With that out of my system, director-writer Victoria Warmerdam's I’m Not a Robot (qualifying after winning Best Short at the 2023 Sitges Film Festival, and distributed to most of the world by The New Yorker) covers ground that many artificial intelligence (AI)-skeptic films have tread before. Its opening minutes are the strongest, as Dutch music producer Lara (Ellen Parren) is enjoying a cover of “Creep” when the music abruptly halts. Her computer asks her to install new software, and provides a CAPTCHA to prove she is not a robot. She fails on each attempt and calls tech support. Whoever is on the phone on the other end is anything but reassuring, as they suggest that Lara might actually be a robot. As her day progresses, Lara finds herself increasingly irked by suggestions that she might not be human.
Lara’s Kafkaesque – or, to use more contemporary references, Twilight Zone- and Black Mirror-esque – dilemma is at its most impactful when it leans into its absurdity and the dark humor that springs from it. But once Lara finishes the call with tech support and takes a post-CAPTCHA test, Ik ben geen robot grinds to a screeching halt for all its novelty. Warmerdam has a promising premise, but never returns to the heights of the opening minutes, although I am sure philosophy students will strongly disagree. Ellen Parren, has one of the best performances among the five nominees, and saves the film from being generic – very little distinguishes I’m Not a Robot from this growing subgenre of sci-fi aside from its humor and handsome production design.
Directed by David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz and executive produced by Adam McKay (2015’s The Big Short, the execrable Don’t Look Up from 2021), A Lien (pronounced “alien”, not “a lien”) showcases a revolting situation, but does so using revolting filmmaking. It is the embodiment of what I despise most in documentary or live action short filmmaking. Given current Academy tastes (this year’s nominations, as a whole, felt like as if the Academy was trying to send the current occupant of the White House a message), A Lien is almost certainly and undeservedly the frontrunner.
Couple Oscar and Sophia Gomez (William Martinez and Victoria Ratermanis, respectively) are driving to a Department of Homeland Security office for the former’s green card interview (Oscar is Salvadoran American; green card holders are more formally known as “lawful permanent residents”). Their young daughter, Nina (Koralyn Rivera) is accompanying them. Sophia, on the drive there, and while stepping into the DHS office, is clearly nervous. When Oscar leaves for the interview, he takes Nina with him (why would you take your antsy child with you to a Very Important Interview?), leaving Sophia to further panic when she sees U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents hauling undocumented immigrants into custody. C-SPAN coverage of a Donald Trump speech lambasting immigrants sends her into a panic – no government office is playing C-SPAN on full blast nor is lit as dourly as the film portrays, come the fuck on – spiraling into a terrible moment that will shred the lives of the Gomez family.
As much as I might agree with the film’s anger towards contemporary American immigration policy and its enforcement practices, that does not give A Lien a pass for the shittiest filmmaking in this category for many years. The constant use of close-up hand-held cinematography and frequent, nauseating editing is purposeful, but its overuse brings A Lien to the point of aurally and visually assaulting the viewer. There is no nuance to this hyperbolic acting – no sense of love shared between the couple, no attempting to hide distress during scary moments, and dialogue and emoting that is obnoxiously and (given the precarious situation) unrealistically loud.
A Lien commits the sin of placing its message first, its filmmaking after. It becomes a browbeating public service announcement, fit for liberal Americans receptive to virtue signaling and for those who want only to reinforce their worldview.
The Last Ranger (2024, South Africa)
Compared to A Lien, Cindy Lee’s The Last Ranger – based on actual events – is a palate cleanser! At the Amakhala Game Reserve in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, we find a young Xhosa girl named Litha (Liyabona Mroqoza as a child, Kamogelo Ndawo as an adult) who lives among the staff and rangers at the reserve. Her friend, the ranger Khuselwa (Avumile Qongqo), asks if she would like to see a rhino. Litha jumps at the chance. Along the way, Litha and Khuselwa talk about poachers and the COVID-19 pandemic’s affect on tourism at the reserve. Soon after, they find the rhino Thandi, whom Kuselwa has a personal connection to. But just as they arrive, a group of poachers – armed with a sniper rifle loaded with a big game tranquilizer, more conventional firearms, and a chainsaw to cut off rhino horns – take aim Thandi.
An anti-poaching narrative seems quaint in the 2020s (if a filmmaker in the 2020s is going to address nature, they invariably touch climate change instead), having been in vogue at the turn of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the message is a welcome one and benefits from outstanding acting from Liyabona Mroqoza. The vistas of the Amakhala Game Reserve are extraordinary, and Lee knows how to beautifully capture the immensity of this landscape on film. If anything, The Last Ranger is a bit too morally simplistic: poaching stems from economic desperation and poverty. The emotional punch when The Last Ranger identifies ones of its poacher characters does not land cleanly, although the follow-up – some sort of Xhosa song or prayer – recovers from that misstep. The film becomes one of the better entries into the exhausted canon of live-action short films involving childhood trauma. One can thank some admirable filmmaking and strong performances for that distinction.
^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.
From previous years:
85th Academy Awards (2013)
87th (2015)
88th (2016)
89th (2017)
90th (2018)
91st (2019)
92nd (2020)
93rd (2021)
94th (2022)
95th (2023)
96th (2024)
For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.
