Oscars short films 2025 review – from immigration hell to kiss-averse kids and inspirational octogenarians | Film

Once again, the British-based Shorts streaming platform is doing a valuable service by packaging the short films which have been nominated for Academy Awards this year in three categories: live action, animation and documentary (15 pieces in all), and there are enough high points here to make up for some of the duller and more redundant moments.

In the live-action drama category, the most garlanded already is The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent from Croatian director Nebojsa Slijepcevic; it is the winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or for short film and is based on the true story of the 1993 Štrpci massacre during the Bosnian war, when Serbian paramilitaries stopped a train and demanded from each passenger who their family’s patron saint was (a way of telling who the Orthodox Serbs were); they took off 18 Muslims and one Croat to be murdered. The film is about the one man who stood up to them, and the film keeps the audience off-balance with an interesting misdirection about who that person is going to be and who is therefore the film’s hero. There is a real chill when the train finally shudders forward again and the people left aboard realise, with a mixture of relief and shame, that they are safe … because they remained silent.

That is an excellent short, but my personal Oscar probably goes to a simpler and more topical drama: A Lien, from New York-based brothers Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz, about a white American woman who has a daughter with her partner, who is an immigrant of El Salvadorian descent: they are summoned to the Department of Homeland Security to regularise his residency status and they are pleased and confident that things will go well. That is of course not the case, and there is a nauseous twist. It’s a film which speaks to modern America.

I was less engaged by Anuja, a slightly cliched India-set film from the American academic and podcaster Adam J Graves about poor street children. Two sisters work in a sweatshop turning out bags: the younger sister, Anuja, is a maths prodigy whose former teacher storms into the factory and tells her to show up to an exam the following week for a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school. But the hatchet-faced manager (who keeps spitting his chai into his cup) figures he can exploit her amazing capacity for mental arithmetic and says, if she quits, he will fire her sister too – and this is the terrible dilemma she faces. It isn’t all that clear why the meanie manager wants to keep Anuja when he already has an electronic calculator which can figure out the sums she does in her head.

The South African movie The Last Ranger is about the worthy, if heart-sinkingly earnest, subject of killing rhinos for their horns; a bad thing of course. A national park ranger, tasked with protecting the wildlife, takes a young girl along for the ride in her Jeep and they get into a dangerous situation. But this drama, taken from a true story, does deliver some tension and jeopardy, and indeed some unexpectedly gruesome violence in its climactic moments. Some sci-fi, and in fact some much-needed comedy, is provided by Victoria Warmerdam’s Dutch film I’m Not a Robot, a Blade Runnery lark about a corporate employee at her computer terminal who keeps having to fill in the “I’m Not a Robot” Captcha test (clicking on those squares in a photo with pictures of bridges etc), repeatedly gets it wrong, and realises something awful. Amusing, and well shot, with good use of interiors and exterior locations.

In the world of animation, I was, as ever, a little restive at the tendency towards the twee and the precious, and the fact that animation mostly seems to mean films about and for children; the genre seems to drift often towards a childlike address to the audience. But there was a level of charm in all five nominees. Yuck! from French animator Loïc Espuche is about little kids running wild in a holiday resort, giggling and mock-retching at the grownups kissing. They think they can see their lips glowing pink when they are going to engage in this gross activity, but then two of these kids realise that they have a pink-lipped attraction to each other. The Iranian piece In the Shadow of the Cypress from Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani is a complex, subtle, dreamy film about a former military sea captain living on an island with his daughter and suffering with PTSD: their unhappy lives are mysteriously redeemed by the appearance of a beached whale. Magic Candies is a promising but finally nebulous short from Japanese director Daisuke Nishio: a lonely little kid, who can’t get any other children to play with him, gets some magic candies, each of which will magically compel an animal or inanimate object to talk to him for as long as the sweet stays in his mouth. A nice premise.

However, Belgian artist Nicolas Keppens’s film Beautiful Men is that rarest of things: an Oscar-nominated animation which is not about kids. Three bald guys go to Istanbul for bargain-price hair transplants and their fragile masculinity is severely challenged. But my Oscar in this category would go to Wander to Wonder from Dutch animator Nina Gantz; it is about an imaginary 1980s kids TV programme whose three characters are left alone in a kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland when their fatherly Johnny-Ball-type presenter dies, leaving them alone to make up their own programmes. I mean it as a compliment when I say it reminded me of David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s Remain Indoors quizshow sketch, eerily carrying on into the void after the end of the world.

It is an interesting feature of the documentary section that three of the five films are about law enforcement and violent crime – and the other two feature Beethoven very heavily. My Oscar goes to Incident from artist and film-maker Bill Morrison, a rather amazing found-footage true-crime film about the fatal shooting in 2018 of a barber on a Chicago street corner by a jumpy probationary police officer. The film simply edits together the bodycam footage (largely silent) that the police were later forced to release, together with traffic camera video; these pictures tell a stomach-turning story of a victim who was indeed armed, but who did not draw his holstered weapon as the officers claimed. You can hear the police screaming at each other and to the public that the man pulled a gun (perhaps believing it in the moment, perhaps not); then we absorb the complex story of how a woman officer, weirdly emotional and protective of the officer who killed the man, frantically gets him (and herself) away from danger as angry crowds gather; and then the other officers becoming strangely reticent as they realise that what they say is being recorded. (To Brits, the really extraordinary thing about all this is that carrying deadly weapons around is normal.)

Two other films are about the death penalty in the US. Death By Numbers is about the school shooting by a 14-year-old in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 which claimed 14 lives; it is an all-too-familiar horror, but unusual in one respect: the shooter did not die at the end of it all. With a guilty plea entered, the jury had to decide between life without parole or the death penalty. One survivor, Sam Fuentes, is admirably honest about not being entirely sure about it all, and her final “victim impact statement” speech is very powerful. The killer himself contemptibly hides behind a Covid mask in court, all too obviously as a way of not facing his victims. I Am Ready, Warden is a death-row film about John Henry Ramirez, a former US marine who was arrested in 2008 in Mexico, where he had fled after a murder that took place in Texas in 2004 (and where he fathered a child in exile, although the film doesn’t make it clear if the mother knew about his situation when they began their relationship). He was finally executed in 2022 after much delay and protracted legal argument connected with his demand for a religious pastor to lay hands on him at the moment of lethal injection. A cynic might wonder if this was a delaying tactic maintained in case of last-minute clemency: but Ramirez seems sincere enough. The film includes powerful interviews with Ramirez’s son and with his victim’s grownup son.

For me, the most disconcerting documentary short is Instruments of a Beating Heart from Ema Ryan Yamazaki, the story of a Japanese infant music class drilled into playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy; a little girl picked to play the cymbal is first thrilled at getting to take part, then reduced to a near nervous breakdown when her male music teacher humiliates her in front of all the other children for getting it wrong and for not practising enough; then a kindly female teacher helps her and she gets it right. It’s a happy-ending narrative arc that has maybe been shaped in the edit. But what is the lesson being learned here? Work together with your school community? Obey male authority and be a conformist? There didn’t seem all that much joy in this Ode to Joy.

Conversely, The Only Girl in the Orchestra is about the New York Philharmonic’s veteran double-bassist Orin O’Brien, who has a great love of Beethoven’s Fifth. O’Brien is an amazingly youthful 87-year-old who has only just retired after a storied career playing and teaching, much admired by Leonard Bernstein; she was for many years the only female member of the orchestra and the title’s sexist formulation “girl” is taken from Time magazine’s chortling profile from the 1960s. (The film quotes the then LA Philharmonic conductor Zubin Mehta’s boorish and shaming remark from 1971: “I just don’t think women should be in an orchestra.”) O’Brien is the daughter of Golden Age movie stars Marguerite Churchill and George O’Brien (the star of FW Murnau’s Sunrise), and the film has interesting things to say about her West Coast upbringing and her move to a serious New York music career. There is also her belief that the double bass is not a flashy solo instrument but the bedrock of musical collaboration and integration. She emerges with enormous musical intelligence, humility and seriousness. The film, directed by O’Brien’s niece Molly O’Brien is perhaps not long enough to get into the question of her private and emotional life, but I would have liked to hear her discuss the merits of her “German bow” technique: holding the bow inside the hand, palm out.