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You’ll find two of the finest films nominated for an Oscar this year in this category. One, “Incident,” which is stitched together from body-cam videos and other footage that captured the 2018 shooting of Harith Augustus in Chicago, is a less esoteric work than you might expect from director Bill Morrison, but it locates political resonances within that footage that make it as powerful as Dawson City: Frozen Time. By the time Morrison juxtaposes the different video feeds on the screen at the same time, he’s already presented a horrifyingly unambiguous picture of the racial bias that informs police shootings of Black suspects.

No less provocative is Smriti Mundhra’s “I’m Ready, Warden,” about the redemption that convicted murderer John Henry Ramirez seeks ahead of his execution by the state of Texas. The film empathizes with the regret felt by Ramirez, but it’s most powerful for the way it sits,...

Updated: Jan. 17, 2025

Now that the shortlists have been unveiled for the impending 97th Academy Awards, it’s time to start figuring out which movies will actually be nominated. Nowhere is this more difficult than in the three short-film categories. But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! Below you’ll find the 15 semifinalists in the Best Documentary Short category along with descriptions and embedded videos and/or links where available.

Some of the topics included in this year’s crop are the kangaroo-harvesting industry in Australia, a family weighing whether or not to pursue being cryonically frozen, a death row inmate seeking to make some sort of peace in his life before his execution, a trans lawmaker in Montana fighting anti-trans legislation, and how the children of Ukraine are coping living in a war zone.

Here is your 2025 Oscars Best Documentary Short cheat sheet, ranked based on Gold Derby...

Doc Short Contenders Give Voters Plenty to Ponder

The 15 films that made the shortlist in the Oscars’ documentary short category are all powerful and thought-provoking, making the competition for an Academy Award nod incredibly stiff this year.

Leading the charge are “Incident,” “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” “The Quilters,” “Death by Numbers” and “Keepers.”

The first 89 seconds of Bill Morrison’s police brutality doc “Incident” is silent. Security footage captures a street in Chicago on a July afternoon in 2018. Minutes later, a man is dead. Through a series of recordings of CCTV and police bodycam footage captured from different vantage points, Morrison offers a raw look at the Chicago police shooting of a Black man. The 29-minute New Yorker film won the best short documentary award at the 2023 IDA Documentary Awards and garnered a spot on the influential Doc NYC shortlist earlier this year.

Netflix’s “The Only Girl...

Exclusive: Greenwich Entertainment has secured the North American distribution rights to Us Kids, the Kim A. Snyder-directed documentary, which chronicles the March For Our Lives student-led movement that was sparked by the plague of gun violence ravaging their schools. It premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival and will be released in theaters and on digital platforms on April 9, shortly after the three-year anniversary of March For Our Lives.

The documentary follows Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Samantha Fuentes, gun violence survivors and teenage activists, as they pull together the largest youth protest in American history. Their movement went global with rallies on 6 continents and in over 700 cities in every state across the nation, expanding to address racial injustice, a growing public health crisis, and shocking a political system into change. The movement was instrumental in the record youth voter turnout in 2018 and 2020.

“You have got to watch this film.

Two weeks from now marks the third anniversary of the mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, during which 17 teenagers were tragically killed. On Sunday night (Jan. 31), Academy Award-winning actress, singer and activist Cher and activist Emma Gonzalez — a Parkland survivor — continued the conversation with a virtual screening of Kim A. Snyder’s 2020 documentary, “Us Kids,” followed by a live question and answer session.

“I was happy to see that Emma’s passion has not diminished a drop since the making of this profound documentary,” Cher tells Variety. “As I said during the conversation, I think our generations working together can make great progress addressing gun violence and other important issues”.

The talk, which was capped with a Cher singalong of her 1998 hit, “Believe,” centered not only on the film, but on other issues plaguing the U.S. and the world. “What’s going on...

Director Kim A. Snyder, who last helmed the harrowing documentary Newtown, continues to capture the fight against gun violence with her next film. Us Kids, a selection at Sundance and SXSW, exploring the March For Our Lives movement with Emma González, David Hogg, Samantha Fuentes, and more. Set for a theatrical and virtual cinema release next week, the first trailer has now arrived along with special sneak preview news.

Us Kids will kick off its launch with the Vote With Us Virtual Rally, a national Gotv campaign with the focus to educate, motivate, and mobilize young people and communities of color to vote early. The event will take place this Saturday, October 24, at 3 p.m. Et/Noon Pt, streaming at www.votewith.us and simulcast across YouTube and more. Immediately following the rally, as a special sneak preview, the film will be made available for free over the weekend, October 24-25 on YouTube,...

"Change is on the horizon!" Hopefully it is! An official trailer has debuted for the acclaimed documentary Us Kids, from award-winning doc filmmaker Kim A. Snyder. This originally premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year, and also just stopped by the Montclair Film Festival this fall. It will be available to watch in virtual cinemas starting at the end of October. The film is an inspiring, authentic profile of various young activists from all over America. The primary focus is on the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida who speak out against the national gun-violence epidemic after a mass shooting at their school kills 17 people in 2018. Us Kids chronicles the March For Our Lives movement from the point of view of Parkland students Emma González, David Hogg, Samantha Fuentes, and others that become a key part of the movement. It is a vitally important doc film...

Justin Bieber, Demi Lovato, Mark Ruffalo, Vic Mensa and more will appear during the Vote With Us virtual rally, set to livestream on “Vote Early Day,” Saturday, October 24th.

Andra Day will also perform “Remember I Bleed” and the War and Treaty will cover John Lennon’s “Power to the People” during the three-hour event, which highlights early vote events in Atlanta, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.

The Vote for Us livestream will also shows clips from the upcoming documentary Us Kids, featuring survivors of the Parkland school shooting-turned-activists Emma González,...

After a 2018 mass shooting at a South Florida high school left 17 people dead and 17 more injured, Parkland students Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg and Jackie Corin found themselves at the forefront of a national conversation about gun control reform before they were even old enough to vote.

Two years after the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the survivors are again grappling with the legacy of that terrible day, this time in “Us Kids,” a documentary by Kim A. Snyder (“Newtown”) that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Through the eyes of the young activists, “Us Kids” chronicles the global impact of their efforts over the 18 months that followed, including the March for Our Lives movement and the Road to Change tour to mobilize the youth vote during midterm elections.

“We’re looking forward to using this film as a tool to facilitate more conversations about gun violence prevention around...

The nonstop drama of the Trump White House has succeeded, among other things, in largely pushing gun control from the forefront of the news cycle — no doubt to the relief of the NRA and its allies, despite the continued frequency of U.S. mass shootings. As a result, and perhaps unfairly, Kim A. Snyder’s “Us Kids” feels a bit like old news, as it focuses on a school massacre and the subsequent activist tide that occurred less than two years ago, yet somehow already feel distant. Nonetheless, who themselves just survived a school shooting.

Where Snyder’s 2016 “Newtown” held to the perspective of parents grieving after a gunman killed 26 people (including 20 first-graders) at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary in late 2012, “Kids” charts the very different reaction of students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., a little over five years later. When another gunman (this time an alumnus...

Documentarian Kim A. Snyder had been down this road before, talking to grieving parents and families about children felled by gun violence, three years ago with 2016’s shocking “Newtown.” “I thought, ‘That was it, I was done,'” she told me on the phone. “Since that time, there have been many hundreds of thousands of mass shootings; people are numb. That’s a movie I couldn’t or wouldn’t make today, it was a different moment and motivation.”

But in February 2018, Snyder found herself in Tallahassee, Florida, watching a fiery protest on the steps of the Capitol in the wake of the deadliest high-school shooting spree in U.S. history: At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, a 19-year-old gunman with an Ar-15 automatic rifle killed 17 people and injured 17 more. “The kids arrived demanding change in the state of Florida,” she said. “They were enraged, pissed, and traumatized.

Documentarian Kim A. Snyder had been down this road before, talking to grieving parents and families about children felled by gun violence, three years ago with 2016’s shocking “Newtown.” “I thought, ‘That was it, I was done,'” she told me on the phone. “Since that time, there have been many hundreds of thousands of mass shootings; people are numb. That’s a movie I couldn’t or wouldn’t make today, it was a different moment and motivation.”

But in February 2018, Snyder found herself in Tallahassee, Florida, watching a fiery protest on the steps of the Capitol in the wake of the deadliest high-school shooting spree in U.S. history: At Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, a 19-year-old gunman with an Ar-15 automatic rifle killed 17 people and injured 17 more. “The kids arrived demanding change in the state of Florida,” she said. “They were enraged, pissed, and traumatized.

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival four documentaries spotlight adolescents who inspire change while also holding a mirror up to a society that provoked their pain and path to resistance.

In Kim Snyder’s “Us Kids” the director focuses her lens on a handful of teenagers who survived the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. which claimed 17 lives. The docu examines the lasting trauma of gun violence while also chronicling determined young survivors who speak out against the national gun-violence epidemic and develop the March For Our Lives movement.

Snyder, who directed the 2016 doc “Newtown” about Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, as well as the 2018 nonfiction short “Notes from Dunblane: Lesson from a School Shooting,” had no intention of making another film about gun violence.

“I was very weirdly and karmically in Florida the week of the (Parkland) shooting,” recalls Snyder. “Within days...

Exclusive: The much-anticipated staging of Oklahoma! will be Broadway’s first partner in Hollywood’s Gun Neutral Initiative: For every visible gun that is seen onstage in Oklahoma!, a donation will be made to organizations “committed to helping solve the gun violence crisis by destroying firearms that should be out of circulation.”

Oklahoma!’s participation in the campaign is expected to be announced today by the show’s lead producer Eva Price at a Sundance Film Festival panel titled “See Change: The Call for Gun Neutral Entertainment.”

“We are honored and proud that Oklahoma! will be leading the way on Broadway by partnering with the Gun Neutral Initiative,” Price said in a statement provided to Deadline prior to the panel. “Just because a particular story calls for the presence of a particular weapon, that doesn’t mean that we have to remain complacent in America’s gun-violence epidemic. Helping to...

In today’s TV News Roundup, the two-part “Timeless” series finale airs on NBC in December.

First Looks

Emmy Award-winning Netflix series “Beat Bugs” returns for a third season on Nov. 9. Even more classic Beatles songs will be reimagined this season, including Let It Be, Day in the Life, Hey Jude, Paperback Writer, Yesterday, Revolution, and Long and Winding Road among others. Vocal performances will feature award-winning musical talents Marion Hill, Yusuf Islam, Noah Kahan, Chloe Kohanski, and Welshy Arms.

In an exclusive first look at this Sunday’s episode of the final season of “The Last Ship,” series leads Eric Dane, Bridget Regan and Marissa Neitling are negotiating a hostage situation. “The Last Ship” airs on Sundays at 9 p.m. on TNT.

Dates

NBC has announced the two-part “Timeless” series finale will air on Thursday, Dec. 20 from 8-10 p.m. Fans are promised a thrilling ride through the past,...