Oscar Shorts: Live Action

2024 Oscar® Nominated Short Films – Live Action

A Lien

USA (in English) 15 min.
Director: Sam Cutler-Kreutz and David Cutler-Kreutz
Synopsis: A young couple face up to and deal with a dangerous immigration process.

Anuja

USA (in Hindi) 22 min.
Director: Adam J. Graves
Synopsis: When a gifted 9-year-old girl, who works in a garment factory, is offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to attend school, she is forced to make a heart-wrenching decision that will determine her and her sister’s fate.

I’m Not a Robot

Belgium/Netherlands (in Dutch) 22 min.
Director: Victoria Warmerdam
Synopsis: After repeatedly failing Captcha tests, music producer Lara becomes obsessed with a disturbing question: could she be a robot?

The Last Ranger

South Africa (in Xhosa) 28 min.
Director: Cindy Lee
Synopsis: When young Litha is introduced to the magic of a game reserve by the last remaining ranger, they are ambushed by poachers. In the ensuing battle to save the rhinos, Litha discovers a terrible secret.

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent

Croatia (in Croatian) 13 min.
Director: Nebojsa Slijepcevic
Synopsis: 1993, Bosnia and Herzegovina. A passenger train is stopped by paramilitary forces in an ethnic cleansing operation. As they haul off innocent civilians, only one man out of 500 passengers dares to stand up to them.

BONUS Screening: 

WHEN LAST SEEN

an updating of the Demeter and Persephone myth, focuses on a woman gone missing who uses the official wording of a Missing Persons form to call attention to the multitudes like herself. The root cellar, where Persephone is held captive, holds much more than herbs and jars of preserves. Subverting horror film and police procedural tropes, WHEN LAST SEEN becomes a search party for those taken from the earth.

Filmed in New London | 12 min. 

Post Show Discussion:
      Donna DiNovelli, Director
      Rachel Jett, Artistic Director NTI
      Ms. Antonia Edwards, Actor
      Kat Murphy, Actor
      Kolton Harris, Moderator

Director: Donna DiNovelli
Starring: Rachel Jett, Ashnah Strongheart

Donna DiNovelli has a writing career that spans film, opera, music-theater and stage. A multi-genre artist, DiNovelli attended the 2018 Sundance Film Festival as the co-writer with director Josephine Decker of the Indie narrative feature Madeline’s Madeline, chosen as one of the top ten films of the decade by The New Yorker and distributed by Oscilloscope Films. The short film, When Last Seen, her directorial debut, won finishing funds from the NYC Women’s Fund through the office of the Mayor, 2023-24 and has garnered awards from film festivals in Toronto and Los Angeles. It premiered at the New York Shorts International Film Festival in October.
She conceived and wrote The Good Swimmer, a Pop Requiem with Heidi Rodewald (Passing Strange) presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Constructed completely of “found text” from lifesaving manuals, the music-theater piece, an adaptation of Antigone, was developed in workshops at Beth Morrison’s Prototype Festival of New Opera/New Music Theater and UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance.
Her opera libretti include Florida, with Randall Eng; Oceanic Verses with Paola Prestini; and the San Francisco Opera commissioned, Heart of a Soldier, with music by Grammy-winning composer Christopher Theofanidis.
As a screenwriter, she penned the award-winning short film, Stag directed by Kevin Newbury, starring Sarah Steele—the first of three films shot in her hometown of New London, Connecticut.
Her latest short film, Nubile, advanced to the final round of the 2021 Sundance Episodic Lab and is currently in post-production. She is a Visiting Artist at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts teaching screenwriting and bookwriting. www.donnadinovelli.com

Rachel Jett is the Artistic Director of the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. She holds an MFA from TISCH in Music Theater Writing and attended Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK. She was the first American aspirant to the innovative and esteemed Russian movement coach and teacher Andrei Droznin. She has been teaching Droznin at NTI and various universities and conservatories for 25 years. Rachel was honored at the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame in 2018 for her service as an educator. She proudly serves as the Vice President on the Board of Trustees for Writer’s Block Inc in New London. Her theater performances include Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet directed by Erica Schmidt, multiple performances with Synetic Theater in Washington, DC, The Body Artist by Don Delillo, and NOT ONE DAY by Anne Garrete, directed and adapted by Jody McAuliffe. Other Performances: Stag, a short film by Donna DiNovelli directed by Kevin Newbury, When Last Seen written and directed by Donna DiNovelli, and Breathe Right written and directed by Kolton Harris. She was the choreographer for Songs for a New World by Jason Robert Brown directed by Nicole Brewer. She has directed The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe, Love and Information by Carol Churchill, and She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen for Connecticut College. She is grateful for her musical collaborators Eric, Julianne, Shoshanna, Sun Hee, Pearl, and Will. She is the proud mama of Jett and Phoenix.

Ms. Antonia Edwards, certified Paralegal, chief executive of the grassroots organization SoliDarity Community Engagement Group. She is also a board member of United Sons and Daughters of Freedmen; also, frequently collaborate across the nation to advocate and legislate for the dismantling of inequities, inequalities, and systemic racism affecting American Freedmen – descendants of chattel slaved in the U.S. — in the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts. For the past 5 years, SoliDarity has been involved in intensive community educational engagement on American Freedmen lineage-based acts of atonements on the municipal and state level and reparations from the federal government.

Kolton Harris is a creative visionary leader, educator, facilitator and multi-disciplinary performing artist. His mission is to inspire the artist in every human being by telling stories that can shift the culture towards a posture of humanizing the dehumanized and uplifting stories that unify communities through common experiences.

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DATES AND TIMES SUBJECT TO CHANGE.