You don’t make a movie alone. The filmmakers behind this year’s Oscar-qualifying short films can attest to that.
The directors of “Butterfly,” “The Hemingway” and “Mother Tongue,” each eligible in short film categories at the 2026 Academy Awards, chatted with awards reporter Joe McGovern as part of TheWrap’s Screening Series. There, they discussed the key partnerships that made their work possible.
Evan Mathis, for example, co-directed “The Hemingway” alongside Patrick O’Brien, who also wrote and starred in the project. Mathis and O’Brien have been friends for decades, dating back to the early 2000s.
In 2005, O’Brien was diagnosed with ALS, which inspired his latest short. Mathis said that O’Brien can “move his eyes, raise his eyebrows and smile” to communicate, but “Otherwise, everything gets typed through his machine.” Mathis knew that he wanted to work on this intensely personal project with his longtime friend, though it did push him outside his creative comfort zone.
“I work primarily in commercials, so for me, my gift is telling shorter stories,” Mathis said. “So being able to find a way in that wasn’t a typical kind of narrative intro was, you know, the challenge here. That’s why the first scene is intentionally very long and shows you the process of what Patrick has to go through to write a script.”
While Mathis and O’Brien have known each other for decades, “Butterfly” producer Ron Dyens wanted to work with animation director and artist Florence Miailhe for just as long. Dyens is fresh off an Academy Award win himself, 2025’s Best Animated Feature trophy, for producing “Flow.” Dyens showed the statue off during the screening (he houses it in a Golden Globes box since the Academy doesn’t put their awards in boxes).
He produced Miailhe’s latest animated short film, “Butterfly.” In total, it took 100 days to animate.
“It’s been 25 years that I was waiting to work with Florence. That 100 days is nothing,” he said. “It went very fast because, of course, when I caught Florence, she was well-known enough to find money. It’s a co-production with another production company that is based in Toulouse, in the south of France, because it’s very important to work all together, to trust each other and to find also the money to do a movie, either a short or a feature film.”
The short follows real-life swimmer Alfred Nakache, a Jewish man born in 1915 in French Algiers. Nakache was an Olympic-level swimmer, placing fourth at the 1936 games in Berlin and breaking national records. In 1943, however, he was banned from further participating in swimming competitions and sent to Auschwitz. Nakache survived the camps where his wife and daughter were murdered and returned to the Olympics in the first postwar summer games.
Though the animated film is not a pure documentary, Miailhe said she found it important to capture the life and spirit of the man at its center. Her father had known Nakache, and a relative of the Olympian’s taught her how to swim when she was young. Through this film, she’s met even more of Nakache’s relatives.
“When Alfred Nakache died, his nephew and niece, they were 15 years old, and they had an image of their uncle, and so they knew a bit of his past,” Dyens translated for Miailhe. (Both are French.) “They saw that Florence respected very much the story of their uncle, so it touched Florence a lot.”
Familial connections are a driving point for Vea Mafile’o and Luciane Buchanan’s short film “Mother Tongue” as well. Mafile’o, who directed the short, said that both she and Buchanan, who wrote and stars in it, are Tongan and English/Scottish, with parents who migrated to New Zealand. Because of this, they felt they were “always living sort of in between two worlds.”
Mafile’o spoke about the things lost when people move from their homes, “important things like language and elements of culture.”
“My grandmother, I had trouble communicating with her because she could only speak Tongan,” she said. “But she was also a traditional healer, so I remember she would, like, massage my arm all the time, and I know very much when I’m starting to feel a little bit, like, outcasted or not Tongan enough or not good enough, I can channel back to her, you know, that physical touch and be like, ‘Actually, I am Tongan. I’m all good.’”
This sense of connection lies at the center of “Mother Tongue.” Buchanan wrote the short years ago when she was living in Los Angeles as a 24-year-old actor. At the time, a friend had suggested that she write something personal to her, but she was hesitant because of the impulse to “stay in your lane” as a young person trying to start their career. Audiences now may recognize Buchanan from such projects as “Chief of War” and “The Night Agent.”
Buchanan had a similar experience to Mafile’o’s; she struggled to speak with her grandfather due to a language barrier. Years after she first conceived of this short film, she was grateful to see that storyline connecting with audiences.
“Although it feels like such a personal theme, when we’ve traveled with this film, we’ve met people from all over the world, and we’ve realized this is actually a universal thing because of migration and assimilation to the modern Western culture,” Buchanan said. “We do lose things at the cost of living in different places.”
Watch the full conversation here.
