Oscars Short Film Race: Filmmakers on Animation, AI and Storytelling

Some of the most compelling stories in contention for the Academy Awards aren’t unfolding across two or three hours. They’re being told in a fraction of that time. The race in the short film categories is taking shape, offering a showcase for emerging filmmakers, well-known talents and storytellers pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished in 40 minutes or less.

Spanning live action, animation and documentary filmmaking, the short film categories have long served as a launching pad for directors and a creative outlet for industry veterans eager to experiment outside the constraints of feature-length filmmaking.

Short films often operate with modest budgets and limited — if any — distribution. But those constraints can also encourage creative risk-taking, resulting in intimate character studies, groundbreaking animation and documentaries that tackle volatile subjects with remarkable economy.

Anne Sundberg, helmer of “A Month in Minnesota,” a documentary that chronicles the fallout from the fatal ICE shootings in Minneapolis, wanted her film to show the community response to this violence.

“The first thing was I really wanted to bring people inside the experience of what it was to be in Minnesota at the time that this happened,” says Sundberg. “There were networks that developed. There was a clear sense of purpose. This could have been any city in the U.S. and it happened in Minneapolis, and it was a normal city where kids went to the park and played, where people felt safe going to school, where people generally felt pretty safe going to work, and it turned in a moment. And I think what you saw happen in Minnesota was that people learned quickly how to form networks how to trust each other, how to figure out who needed what.”

Short documentaries can also zoom in on one person and their unique struggles, as in “Listen,” directed by Taliesin Black-Brown, who followed sound recordist Hank Lentfer as he documented sounds in nature as…