The creative teams behind seven Oscar-nominated shorts took part in TheWrap’s Screening Series on Monday, where filmmakers discussed their work ahead of the 97th annual Academy Awards on March 2. Two showcases — live-action/documentary shorts and animated shorts — were held at The Culver Theater in Culver City, California, with both Q&A sessions moderated by TheWrap’s Executive Editor of Awards, Steve Pond.
The first showcase celebrated three nominated films in the live-action and documentary shorts categories.
“I’m Not a Robot” (live-action short) follows a music producer who questions whether she’s a robot after repeatedly failing CAPTCHA tests. “It started as a funny thought, but then my imagination took a darker turn and I really started to wonder,” director Victoria Warmerdam said. “I was really intrigued by the ‘Truman Show’ aspects because, for some reason, I’m so scared that someday someone will tell me that the world is not what I thought it was.”
Trent, a (one-name) producer on the short, added that he was intrigued by Warmerdam’s vision and “absurd way of thinking” and immediately wanted to bring the project to fruition.
“The Last Ranger” (documentary short), the second film in the anthology series “When The World Stopped,” centers on Thandi, a South African rhino that survives a brutal attack and the people who fight to save her life. Producer Darwin Shaw said that it took eight months to get the script ready with writer David Lee, who recommended his sister, Cindy Lee, to direct it.
“It really is all about hope and it is about a community — trying to get them excited, trying to get them involved so that they are able to do something positive,” Lee said.
Another doc short, “Incident,” uses bodycam and surveillance footage to reconstruct the 2018 fatal shooting of barber Harith “Snoop” Augustus by Chicago police officer Dillan Halley and the immediate aftermath. (A judge ruled in favor of the police in 2023 in a wrongful death suit filed by Augustus’ family.) It was important to director Bill Morrison that he tell the story by only utilizing footage released by the police and captured by surrounding businesses.
“Those were the parameters,” he said of his 30-minute film, adding that “all of [the footage] had been made available to the public, and that I wouldn’t add a narrator, a talking head or music — that you could tell the story looking at the footage and then ponder why the police got off.”
The second showcase spotlighted four nominated films in the animated shorts category.
Based on a beloved Korean children’s book of the same name, the CG-animated “Magic Candies” revolves around a young boy who, after eating magical sweets, gains the ability to communicate with animals and inanimate objects.
“It’s a very beautiful, impressive story for me,” producer Takashi Washio said of the Japanese short directed by Daisuke Nishio. “We thought that we really needed to respect the emotion of the main character, Dong-Dong. And also, there are lots of cultural differences between Korea and Japan, so we didn’t want to lose the realistic feeling that we can actually deliver through this film.”
The stop motion-animated “Wander to Wonder” focuses on a trio of tiny performers from a children’s television show as they navigate life after the death of the show’s creator. Director/producer Nina Gantz found herself identifying with the themes explored in the film.
“It is carrying quite a personal experience for me, because while I was writing the last version of the script, I was actually taking care of someone that needed palliative care, and when he died, I saw around me that everyone reacted to his death in a very different way,” the filmmaker said. “Everyone experiences grief in very different ways, and that made its way into the film, even though I wasn’t really aware of it.”
The French animated short “Yuck!” follows a young boy named Leo who pretends to be disgusted by the idea of kissing but secretly wants to try it. Director Loïc Espuche recalled screening another short film he had made — this one about a soldier going off to war, who kisses his fiancée goodbye — to a theater full of kids; their visceral reaction to the kiss sparked the idea for this short.
“All the kids in the audience started to say, ‘Oh yeah, they are going to kiss. Oh no, we cannot watch it!’ That’s when I said, ‘Wow, I absolutely have to make a movie about kissing and the reaction it provokes to children.’” Producer Juliette Marquet credited the premise as “universal.”
“In the Shadow of the Cypress,” an Iranian animated short directed and produced by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani, tells the tale of a former captain suffering from PTSD who lives with his daughter in an isolated seaside home.
“We wanted to narrate a story about a parent and his or her child and that was just that,” Sohani said, who shared that she and Molayemi dug deep into their own relationships with their fathers for inspiration. “Little by little, we developed the scenario and we put a lot of time for this story. We found out that the character of the film, the father’s behavior is similar to someone who is suffering from trauma. We searched a lot about that and besides that, a lot of personal experiences in our life had a lot of impact unconsciously.”
Watch the full live-action/documentary shorts conversation here.
