Spirits were high at TheWrap’s Live Action Short Film Showcase, a screening and 50-minute conversation with the filmmakers of the five Oscar-nominated movies in the category.
The Best Live Action Short lineup has in recent years been populated by “one grim film after another,” as TheWrap’s Executive Awards Editor Steve Pond mentioned while introducing this year’s nominees. “But these are a really great and varied bunch of films. Serious and funny and everything in between.”
On the funny side of the spectrum is the flat-out comedy “Jane Austen’s Period Drama,” written and directed by Julia Aks and Steve Pinder, which announces its sense of humor with the clever pun in its title: A costumed 19th-century British romance, the parody features a handsome aristocrat who mistakes his intended’s menstrual flow for a grievous injury.
Aks, an actress who also stars in the short, explained that the idea began as sketch comedy. “When I went to write what was just intended to be a three-minute sketch, I posted in a Facebook group of women asking for funny period stories,” she said. “And the response that I got was this really, really long comment thread of just women just, like, pouring out their hearts. Some things were funny, most things were really heartbreaking.”
The comments inspired Aks to “reflect on my own relationship with my own body and shame about menstruation,” she said. And though the film retained its humorous tone, she also consulted with menstruation scholars to help achieve a deeper understanding within the comic portrayal. “It just became something that I felt really passionate about in myself but also for the world,” she said.
Director Sam Davis, meanwhile, was the cinematographer on a 2018 film about menstruation (“Period. End of Sentance”) that won the Best Documentary Short Oscar. He was also nominated in that category alongside Sean Wang for “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó” in 2024, and this year received his second Oscar nom for his live-action short “The Singers,” about an impromptu sing-off among gruff barflies at a roadside pub.
Davis filled his film with first-time actors, including Mike Young, a New York City busker who was cast from an Instagram video where he sings “Unchained Melody,” which he does in the movie as well. “We filled up a bar with viral-video singing sensations and these other sort of unknown talents, like geniuses in the rough, and let them slowly reveal their gifts over the course of a film,” he said. “It was really a weird, unorthodox process, but it was a really special journey.”
Directed by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, the black-and-white, French-language short “Two People Exchanging Saliva” is set within a shopping mall in a near-future where kissing is a crime punishable by death. The absurdist satire stars Zar Amir Ebrahimi (“Holy Spider”) and is narrated by Vicky Krieps (“Phantom Thread”).
Despite the Oscar nomination, Musteata explained that she still feels nervous about how audiences will respond to the deadpan comedy. “We made it with a lot of heart and a lot of love,” she said. “And at the end of the day, for us, it’s a film about the absurdity of repression and the fact that no matter what, as human beings, we will always crave intimacy, we will always crave love and that is much, much stronger than hate.”
A shared theme of social commentary emerges in “Butcher’s Stain,” from director Meyer Levinson-Blount (a Student Academy Award winner) and producer Oron Caspi. The short concerns a Palestinian supermarket employee (Omar Sameer) accused of tearing down posters of Israeli hostages.
The film began as a project for Levinson-Blount at Tel Aviv University. “I was working at a supermarket after the 7th of October,” he said. “And I witnessed this situation where there was so much tension between the Jewish and Arab workers, and I saw that as sort of like a reflection of a larger trend that was happening in Israel at the time.”
He said the situation provided an insight into telling both sides of the human conflict in Israel and Palestine. “I wanted to tell the story of collective trauma and national crisis, but I also wanted to tell the story of how that affects individuals who are part of certain ethnicities that are then targeted and have to face racism and discrimination unfairly.”
Lastly, the screening conversation was joined via Zoom by James Dean, the British producer of “A Friend of Dorothy.” The short, written and directed by Lee Knight, chronicles the unlikely friendship between a teenage boy (Alistair Nwachukwu) and an 87-year-old widow (famed actress and raconteur Miriam Margolyes).
Dean pointed out that the plot was inspired by a real event in Knight’s life and that the story’s warmth and optimism inspired him to make the film. “Just to show anything where people are connecting across a divide or an unlikely friendship — that becomes incredibly meaningful to people,” he said. “That just seemed like an important thing to do.”
The casting of Margolyes was a major coup. “She’s an absolute legend here in the UK and she had kind of expressed an interest, so I just checked with her agent that he wasn’t living in a fantasy world,” he said. “Sure enough, Miriam was interested in doing it, so she carved out some time for us and we just set that as our production week and got on and made it.”
The 98th Academy Awards will be telecast on March 15. In addition to the Oscar Nominated Short Films program playing in theaters, the titles are also available to view on Netflix (“The Singers”), The New Yorker (“Jane Austen Period Drama,” Two People Exchanging Saliva”), Kanopy (“Butcher’s Stain”) and Attitude Magazine (“A Friend of Dorothy”).
For the full Screening Series conversation, click here.
