The Live Action Short Film Nominees are…
The organization SHORTS (home of ShortsTV) has brought this year’s batch of Oscar nominated Live Action, Documentary, and Animated Short Films to a global audience. Here’s our rundown of the Live Action films, chiming in from all over the globe.
Get an edge in your Oscar pool, and more importantly, be informed about some solid, if short, cinema that is being celebrated:
A Lien
DIRECTOR: SAM CUTLER-KREUTZ AND DAVID CUTLER-KREUTZ / USA / 15 MINUTES
“A Lien” is a perfect encapsulation of how America’s immigration system is less about “law and order” and more about cruelty as policy. For years, people like Trump and his supporters have insisted they’re only against illegal immigration while doing everything in their power to make legal immigration as difficult, arbitrary, and dehumanizing as possible. This film strips away the rhetoric and exposes the reality: that the system isn’t broken by accident—it’s broken by design.
The emotional core of the film isn’t just in the couple’s struggle to navigate a deliberately hostile bureaucracy but in the quiet, unspoken truth that this system is working exactly as intended. What “A Lien” does so well is cut through the noise and make the stakes personal. It doesn’t just present immigration as a political issue but as a deeply human one, where real people’s lives are put on hold, fractured, or outright destroyed by policies made for and by stupid, hateful people. The film is effective because it doesn’t rely on melodrama—it simply lays out the reality of what it’s like to be at the mercy of a system designed to fail you. And it makes clear that for a certain subset of Americans, that’s the entire point.
– Paul Hibbard
Anuja
DIRECTOR: ADAM J. GRAVES / INDIA, USA / 22 MINUTES
Entirely watchable but fully middling, the Netflix short “Anuja” attempts to take us onto the mean streets of urban India. As it turns out, said streets don’t seem so mean, really. Visually imbued with golden-hued warmth, the squalor of impoverished orphaned sisters Palak and Anuja simply never reads like the tragic desolation that it is for the real life street children of India that the film was made to advocate for. I suppose in that sense, “Anuja” is a failure.
Yet, teenage Palak and nine-year-old Anuja have real chemistry, which has no doubt carried the film to its Oscar nomination. It’s all the more impressive then that both actresses aren’t really actresses at all, but real-life street children. (That fact is front loaded as text as the end credits start). Palak works her days at a sewing machine in a sweatshop making dresses, but also secretly making tote bags with the discarded fabric. Anuja is a math savant with a brighter future IF they can come up the money to pay for some important academic exams. Can they hustle enough of Palak’s handmade bags on the streets to get the immediate funds they need?
Eventually, Anuja is left to make a hard choice about her own future and her older sister’s well being. I don’t mind saying that in this, “Anuja” feels a bit incomplete. It also feels imbalanced to see a raftload of producers, some quite wealthy and high-profile (Mindy Kaling, Priyanka Chopra Jones), gathered to tell the story of an abnormally intelligent orphan struggling to come up any money at all. Who knows, maybe “Anuja” will somehow help the young people who need it? Because I doubt it’s going to bag a golden statuette for its benefactors and makers.
– Jim Tudor
I’m Not a Robot
DIRECTOR: VICTORIA WARMERDAM / BELGIUM, NETHERLANDS / 22 MINUTES
“I’m Not a Robot” takes a premise that most filmmakers would treat as a throwaway gag—a woman failing a CAPTCHA test so many times that she starts questioning her own humanity—and elevates it into something far more unsettling. There’s humor, sure, but it’s not the easy, winking kind. Instead, the film plays it straight, letting the absurdity slowly curdle into existential horror. What starts as a quirky inconvenience builds into a genuine crisis of identity, and the film, to its credit, never blinks. It understands that true sci-fi paranoia isn’t about robots taking over—it’s about waking up one day and realizing you don’t fit into the world the way you thought you did.
What really makes it work is how much tension and emotional weight it wrings out of something so deceptively simple. The protagonist’s slow unraveling is both darkly funny and deeply unnerving, not because she might actually be a robot, but because the film forces us to consider how easily reality can start slipping through our fingers. Lesser filmmakers would go broad with this, but “I’m Not a Robot” is far smarter—it keeps things ambiguous, emotionally grounded, and just self-aware enough to make you laugh while you squirm.
– Paul Hibbard
The Last Ranger
DIRECTOR: CINDY LEE / SOUTH AFRICA / 28 MINUTES
“The Last Ranger” has its heart in the right place. It wants to show the human cost of conservation, the moral weight of protecting endangered species, and the outright evil of poachers who hack apart rhinos for profit. All good things. But instead of trusting the audience to engage with these ideas, the film opts for the most heavy-handed, manipulative storytelling possible. Every moment is drenched in self-importance, every emotion telegraphed in bold, underlined, all-caps letters. It’s the kind of film where you can feel the director standing just off-screen, arms folded, nodding solemnly, making sure you get it.
The problem with going this broad is that it ends up undercutting the very message it’s trying to send. The world of conservation is messy, full of moral grays, but this film paints everything in thick black-and-white strokes. The poachers aren’t just bad, they’re practically twirling mustaches; the heroes don’t just struggle, they suffer in ways that feel more engineered than earned. And when a film is working this hard to force an emotional reaction, it starts to feel less like a story and more like an exercise in cinematic arm-twisting. Which is a shame, because there’s a real, complex, urgent story in here somewhere. It just got buried under all the weight of its own self-seriousness.
– Paul Hibbard
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent
DIRECTOR: NEBOJSA SLIJEPCEVIC / CROATIA / 13 MINUTES
Tense and harrowing, “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent” distills one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century into a brief but devastating narrative. Rather than focusing directly on the horror of the Štrpci massacre as a whole, it centers on a single man—Tomo Buzov—who dared to speak out against it. The result is a masterful glimpse, not to lessen the brutality, but to highlight the humanity within it. By showing how even good men can be both afraid and heroic in the face of immense danger, the film finds its power in quiet resistance rather than sensationalized violence.
Buzov’s story is so briefly powerful. He wasn’t a soldier in combat, nor a leader rallying troops—just a man on a train, making an impossible decision. And in doing so, he is a hero. The film doesn’t offer comfort, nor does it suggest that bravery is always enough to alter fate. Instead, it underscores the weight of moral courage in a world that too often punishes it.
– Paul Hibbard