Best Documentary Short

Audible

CODA isn’t the only reason this is a landmark year for deaf representation at the Oscars. This short documentary is an ostensible chronicle of a top high school football team trying to bounce back after their lengthy winning streak is snapped—but the team is from the Maryland School for the Deaf, so the team and the movie have a lot more than just sports on their minds. Director Matthew Ogens came to the story after filming a commercial campaign about top high school teams; he connected with the school because his best friend was deaf, and he worked closely with the deaf community to make sure he portrayed it with respect.

Lead Me Home

Pedro Kos, director of last year’s Rebel Hearts and editor of the Oscar nominees The Square and Waste Land, and Jon Shenk, director of An Inconvenient Sequel and The Island President, spent three years chronicling homelessness on the West Coast for this Netflix film. The closest thing to the 39-minute HBO docs that once dominated the category, it’s an observational film that puts viewers on the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle and asks its audience to watch and listen rather than drive by.

The Queen of Basketball

The only one of this year’s nonfiction nominees also nominated last year, Ben Proudfoot has moved from music and dry cleaning (the subjects of 2020’s A Concerto Is a Conversation) to basketball—specifically, the life and career of Lusia “Lucy” Harris, one of the greatest female basketball players ever. “I was looking for people where there’s a huge gap between their significance and how many people know who they are, and when I heard about her, I thought, Why don’t I know the name Lucy Harris?” he said. So he tracked down Harris, called her and pitched a film. “She said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. People don’t know my story. Come on over.’ So my cinematographer and I got a minivan and drove to Mississippi.”

Three Songs for Benazir

The plight of the Afghan people is conveyed quietly but powerfully in Three Songs for Benazir, which is set in a Kabul displaced-persons camp where a young married man wants to resist the lure of easy money in the poppy fields (“opium is where death waits for us all”) and join the army instead. The shortest film in the category at just over 20 minutes, Afghan filmmakers Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan Mirzaei’s short is a heartbreaking look at an environment where the protagonist remarks ruefully, “We’ll either be bombed by the foreigners or killed by the Taliban.”

When We Were Bullies

In some ways, this is the most playful of the nominees, with director Jay Rosenblatt looking back on his fifth-grade New York City class and using animation to help the class photo come to life. But it’s also a thoughtful look at memory, prompted by an incident in which almost the entire class bullied one student. “That was probably the biggest challenge I had with the film,” Rosenblatt said. “It is serious. There’s mortality, there’s death. It took me a long time, two or two-and-a-half years, to edit the film, and the tone just evolved as I was working on it. The animation helped give it a playful tone at times, and the music added a certain seriousness at other times. It was just a matter of finding the balance.”