This year's Oscar shorts are affecting, distressing and a little weird

Washington Post

13-02-2025

The annual road show of Academy Award-nominated short films that has been making the rounds of major cities for the past two decades is welcome on a number of fronts. Audiences get to spot filmmaking talents on the rise, animation and documentary techniques at the forefront, and hot-button topics addressed with creativity and fire. All that and some inside dope for your office Oscar betting pool.
What the three programs of animated, live-action and documentary short films don't offer are any sense of continuity or, conversely, variation, since they're nominated not as programs but as individual works of quality. Thus, you can end up with a situation like this year's live-action lineup, five films whose cumulative bleakness might send you out of the theater despairing that the world will ever be set right.
The best of the five and the most immediately infuriating — that's a measure of its success — is 'A Lien,' from brothers Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz; it follows a married couple (played by William Martinez and Victoria Ratermantis) who show up at the New York City immigration office with their young daughter (Koralyn Rivera) for a scheduled appointment to have the husband's application for citizenship approved. The film, suspenseful and heartbreaking, educates audiences on the real-life practice by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement of using required green card interviews as a hunting ground to deport people who've been in this country since childhood. More relevant now than when it was made, 'A Lien' reminds a viewer that, for too many agencies and administrations, the cruelty is the point.
The other films on the program illustrate the perils of speaking up in 1993 Bosnia ('The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent'), the plight of child laborers in India ('Anuja'), the hardships of South African game rangers trying to protect endangered rhinos from poachers ('The Last Ranger') and the 'Black Mirror'-like possibility that some of us may fail those 'I am not a robot' verification puzzles because we are, in fact, robots ('I'm Not a Robot'). All are thoughtful, well-made and deserving of their nominations, but their combined weight may leave you gasping for breath.
The documentary shorts, by contrast, illustrate the vexing modern habit of preprogramming the audience's emotions with heart-tugging music and fancy filmmaking footwork instead of just the facts. Two entries dealing with the death penalty, 'I Am Ready, Warden,' about the final days of death row prisoner John Henry Ramirez, and 'Death by Numbers,' about a survivor of the 2018 Parkland high school shooting attending the killer's sentencing, are powerful enough without the extra frills. Two other shorts focus on women at either end of the human lifespan: the Netflix documentary 'The Only Girl in the Orchestra,' about retiring New York Philharmonic double bass player Orin O'Brien, and 'Instruments of a Beating Heart,' which focuses on a 6-year-old Japanese schoolgirl as she struggles to take part in a school assembly program. The first is a delightful and belated introduction to a larger-than-life force of nature, and the second is a surprisingly complex emotional journey that had me tearing up at times — my second favorite film in this category.
My favorite in the documentary short category, and the one that easily deserves to win, is 'Incident,' which shows the 2018 shooting of Harith 'Snoop' Augustus by Chicago police officers from the uninflected POVs of street surveillance cameras and law enforcement body cams. Brilliantly edited by the gifted filmmaker Bill Morrison ('Decasia'), who splits the screen into multiple feeds as neighborhood tensions ratchet up in the minutes after the killing, 'Incident' leaves viewers to come to their own conclusions, the most inescapable of which is that this was a situation that never needed to happen, instigated and escalated by rookie cops and ending in the appalling waste of an innocent man's life.
One arrives at the animated shorts nominees hoping for a little levity, please, and past years have seen entries from Pixar and Disney take the prize with ingenuity, wit and endless computing power. This year's program is mostly … weird. And by weird, I mean 'Wander to Wonder,' an absurdist comedy about a British children's TV show whose eccentric creator has died, leaving his three miniature characters alive and confused. By weird, I mean 'Beautiful Men,' about three balding Belgian brothers who journey to Istanbul for hair transplant operations. By weird, I mean 'In the Shadow of the Cypress,' a poetic, pastel Iranian fable about a traumatized sea captain, his daughter and a beached whale. And by really weird — but creative, hilarious and oddly moving — I mean 'Magic Candies' from Japan, about a lonely little stop-motion boy who sucks hard candies that give voice to his living room couch, his dog, the autumn leaves and his grandmother's ghost.
That leaves France's adorable 'Yuck!,' a loopily animated charmer about a vacationing gang of kids who respond to all the kissing grown-ups they see by yelling the title sentiment — until little Leo and Lucy find their own lips glowing in unexpected mutual attraction. Yuck! Ew! Awww. And after all the talented intensity of the other nominees: phew.
Unrated. At area theaters; check listings for separate program times. Animated shorts: 88 minutes. Live-action shorts: 102 minutes. Documentary shorts: 159 minutes. Contain disturbing situations, documentary violence and stop-motion nudity.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.