Oscar Short Film Race Spotlights Bold Stories, New Animation Tech and Creative Risk-Taking

Some of the most compelling stories in contention for the Academy Awards aren’t unfolding across two or three hours. They’re being told in a fraction of that time. The race in the short film categories is taking shape, offering a showcase for emerging filmmakers, well-known talents and storytellers pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished in 40 minutes or less.

Spanning live action, animation and documentary filmmaking, the short film categories have long served as a launching pad for directors and a creative outlet for industry veterans eager to experiment outside the constraints of feature-length filmmaking.

Short films often operate with modest budgets and limited — if any — distribution. But those constraints can also encourage creative risk-taking, resulting in intimate character studies, groundbreaking animation and documentaries that tackle volatile subjects with remarkable economy.

Anne Sundberg, helmer of “A Month in Minnesota,” a documentary that chronicles the fallout from the fatal ICE shootings in Minneapolis, wanted her film to show the community response to this violence.

“The first thing was I really wanted to bring people inside the experience of what it was to be in Minnesota at the time that this happened,” says Sundberg. “There were networks that developed. There was a clear sense of purpose. This could have been any city in the U.S. and it happened in Minneapolis, and it was a normal city where kids went to the park and played, where people felt safe going to school, where people generally felt pretty safe going to work, and it turned in a moment. And I think what you saw happen in Minnesota was that people learned quickly how to form networks how to trust each other, how to figure out who needed what.”

Short documentaries can also zoom in on one person and their unique struggles, as in “Listen,” directed by Taliesin Black-Brown, who followed sound recordist Hank Lentfer as he documented sounds in nature as he cares for his mother, who’s in the final stages of dementia.

“It’s my real hope that it just inspires people to listen, to maybe pause and then to kind of just experience nature and the sounds around them,” says Black-Brown. “It can be profound to experience those sounds and I think sometimes there’s so much noise in our environment, whether it’s the noise in urban places, or someone is doing construction over there. Just to make space to sit in a park and listen to a bird. It can be really healing.”

Some of this year’s early frontrunners in the animated shorts category come from the singular visions of directors committed to a genre or experimenting with new technologies. Short films are often a place for new animation techniques to be given an opportunity to be used in surprising ways.

For the director of “Praying Mantis,” it was a way to bring his love of hand-drawn 2D animation together with his passion for horror films. Helmer Joe Hsieh spent about four years bringing this project to the screen.

“I think short films are a very, very good way to show that horror and animation are full of imagination,” says Hsieh, who is based in Taiwan. “A short film is also a good way to show that you can make what you imagined into something. You start with the idea of the character and you build from there to make a story for the audiences.”

With “Dear Upstairs Neighbors,” the filmmakers wanted to push emerging AI technologies to take artist-created drawings and assemble a short based on those drawings while guided by the artists. The movie follows a frazzled insomniac as she tries to get some sleep.

Marcia Mayer, executive producer of the short who formerly worked at Pixar, sees the controversy around AI as similar to what happened when CG tech came along and disrupted the hand-drawn pipeline.

“Short films are often done as a test of new technology in animation,” says Mayer. “We scanned 35 paintings and trained a model on the different styles of painting. We’re using AI to create the look the filmmakers always wanted and it’s making it possible to make this film in a realistic timeline. It became possible for Connie [He], the director, to use these tools to make the film she wanted to make.”

In the live action category, the landscape is also diverse, with filmmakers sometimes taking inspiration from their own lives or even coming to subjects after they’re commissioned to create a short.

“Jozefa,” helmed by Kathryn Kalucki, was crafted as a short after the filmmakers had looked for a way to create a story about the director’s grandmother and her early experiences as a refugee.

“My producing partner and I decided we had to use the resources we have, the talent we have and the time we have to create a short,” says Kalucki. “We shot for a very feverish two-and-a-half days, and we had a one-week prep. We shot in Burbank and we were able to make something powerful, even with all those limitations.”

Filmmakers who create short films are often pushing against limited resources and abbreviated shooting schedules, but for creators like Patrick Willems, who directed the live action short “Power Trip,” that’s not new. It may actually even be a bit easier to work with a crew who are used to moving quickly to capture what they need over just a few days.

“I make YouTube videos for a living, and I have a channel where I do long-form film criticism, but I also weave in narrative filmmaking into everything,” says Willems. “I’m used to having almost no resources and having to do everything myself. So making a short like this feels amazing because I don’t have to do everything myself and there’s a great professional crew working with me. You learn there’s no time to waste.”

Mekhai Lee, who directed the live action short “Them That’s Not,” also sees the short as a unique art form and not necessarily a bid to a feature. There are advantages for him to tell his stories in this way.
“It’s like the novella to the novel,” says Lee. “I like the short story. I love reading short stories by [James] Baldwin. I love Octavia Butler. I just finished a series of short stories by her. And these are novelists. The short films just work in a different way. There’s a different approach to it. I think the way that this film was executed in this time, in this space, within these parameters, that is exactly what and how it needed to be done. This is exactly the best way to put the story into the world.”

Seasoned filmmakers like Academy Award-winning Sean Baker (“Anora”) find making a short an opportunity to explore themes and develop techniques that have interested them. His live action short, “Sandiwara,” stars Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, and is the fruit of fashion house Self-Portrait’s residency program.

“I think you have to always be practicing your craft and learning new things,” says Baker. “I never consider myself an expert filmmaker. So, when these opportunities come around and I connect with the idea, it’s just an opportunity for further learning and it was wonderful to connect with a new crew that worked on this short.”

Filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal has a couple of features and a lot of acclaim on her resumé, and views shorts as a type of art that gives a voice to projects not always meant to be developed as features. Her live action short, “Flesh Impact,” focuses on the life of Marilyn Monroe and stars Ellen Burstyn and Dakota Johnson.

“I think some stories are meant to be 17 minutes, like mine,” says Gyllenhaal, who was commissioned by Genesis to create a short film about Monroe. “Short films don’t get distribution. It’s not realistic to finance something like this. I think it’s an interesting medium that isn’t totally rooted in commercialism.
But where does this live? I think of short films almost like these little geodes that look like a rock from the outside but when you turn it over it’s full of something unexplainable.”