{"id":189944,"date":"2026-02-23T13:13:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T13:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/189944\/"},"modified":"2026-02-23T13:13:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T13:13:12","slug":"oscars-2026-your-guide-to-the-5-nominated-documentary-shorts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/189944\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2026: Your guide to the 5 nominated documentary shorts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Some of this year\u2019s Oscar-nominated<\/a> documentary shorts hit so hard, viewers may be grateful to come across one that simply follows donkeys visiting an observatory in the desert \u2014 even if it bumps up against the very boundaries of the genre.<\/p>\n

\u2018All the Empty Rooms\u2019 \""All <\/p>\n

Director Joshua Seftel hadn\u2019t spoken with his former colleague, longtime CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman, in 25 years. Then Hartman, famed for stories of human kindness and compassion, reached out: He and photojournalist Lou Bopp had been documenting bedrooms left behind by children killed in American school shootings.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said to him, \u2018This could be a great film,\u2019\u201d says Seftel, though Hartman asked not to be in it. \u201cI said, \u2018You are the \u201cGood News Guy\u201d and people trust you. If the Good News Guy is telling you he\u2019s got some bad news, people are going to listen.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

The rooms provide silent testament to those who once lived there. One is festooned in SpongeBob memorabilia; another contains the rack on which a girl would arrange her outfits for the week.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou meet these families and hear the stories and there\u2019s a heaviness\u201d in the rooms, says Seftel. He says he could see them weigh on Bopp and Hartman. A filmmaker friend, on seeing the film, told Seftel, \u201cSteve Hartman is a haunted man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud\u2019 \""Armed <\/p>\n

Brent Renaud and his brother, Craig, made documentaries in Haiti, Egypt, Iraq and other hot spots, and won awards for their portrait of a troubled Chicago school. Then, while covering the war in Ukraine, Brent was killed by Russian soldiers.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Brent, it was always a focus on people caught in the middle of conflicts,\u201d says Craig Renaud. \u201cGoing back to the front lines over and over again, we often had to be on the ground for months at a time in these war zones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Included in the clips of Brent Renaud\u2019s work: a weeping Iraqi woman clutching the bloody jeans of her slain son; Renaud interviewing a Honduran boy embarking on the hazardous trek to the U.S. on his own; and a Somali man telling Renaud, \u201cThe way you hold the camera, you\u2019re doing it from your heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

It also includes casual mention of his diagnosis as neurodivergent.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s calm as a monk in a firefight,\u201d Craig Renaud says, \u201cbut a cocktail party in Brooklyn is absolutely terrifying.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Children No More: Were and Are Gone\u2019 \""Children <\/p>\n

In Tel Aviv, a group of Israeli protesters stands silently, holding posters emblazoned with the faces of Palestinian children who have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey didn\u2019t choose to be part of this war,\u201d says Israeli filmmaker Hilla Medalia. \u201cThey were killed not because they brought it on themselves, but because someone decided they needed to die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Medalia\u2019s film follows activists whose silent vigils draw both support and condemnation. So far, despite sometimes having to abandon their protests when situations become potentially threatening, they remain undaunted.<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir focus is to stop the war and this war crime and other things that are happening in our name, and to force the general public to confront those images and to look at the kids and to feel for them,\u201d Medalia says. \u201cIt\u2019s amazing to me how humanity and compassion become an act of resistance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018The Devil Is Busy\u2019 \""The <\/p>\n

At a women\u2019s health clinic in Atlanta, a typical day includes religious protesters on megaphones (\u201cAll men,\u201d points out co-director Geeta Gandbhir<\/a>) and women seeking help only to discover their pregnancies are just past the six-week mark, making terminating them illegal in Georgia.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe decided to focus on the providers,\u201d says Gandbhir. \u201cThey\u2019re putting themselves at risk to provide care. What you see are the hurdles they face.\u201d<\/p>\n

Co-director Christalyn Hampton says the burdens on these independent clinics have drastically increased as about 50 Planned Parenthood sites closed last year. She points out the spectrum of healthcare provided and the complexity of situations for both patients, many of whom must travel considerable distances, and providers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the technician is giving the young lady a sonogram, the [patient] goes through several emotions: She\u2019s happy, she\u2019s crying, she\u2019s nervous. That speaks to the vulnerability these women feel when they have to make certain decisions. That emotional moment [reminds us] of that human aspect.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018perfectly a strangeness\u2019 \""perfectly <\/p>\n

A trio of donkeys traverses a desert to an observatory. Captured with creative camera angles and accompanied by an imaginative score, Alison McAlpine\u2019s film pushes the boundaries of what documentaries are.<\/p>\n

While shooting her previous feature in Chile, McAlpine noticed donkeys hanging out around an observatory. \u201cWe hired three gentle donkeys [for the film]. It was a combination of trying to direct the donkeys up from the valley to the observatory, and sometimes we just followed the donkeys.\u201d<\/p>\n

McAlpine acknowledges that her film has been difficult to categorize. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s at IDFA, which is an international documentary festival. Sometimes it\u2019s just competing with fiction, where it\u2019s been lucky to win awards sometimes. But what is a documentary? As soon as you put on a lens and a frame, it\u2019s a personal document, not something objective.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been moved because people have been touched; they seem to be transported elsewhere, which is what one wants as a filmmaker.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some of this year\u2019s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts hit so hard, viewers may be grateful to come across one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189945,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[89142,89138,89140,28729,89144,82265,89137,67405,89145,89139,48,52,51,47,50,49,89141,592,89143,2664,72],"class_list":["post-189944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-alison-mcalpine","tag-brent-renaud","tag-craig-renaud","tag-documentary","tag-documentary-short","tag-donkey","tag-great-film","tag-hartman","tag-haunted-man","tag-iraqi-woman","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-observatory","tag-people","tag-seftel","tag-war","tag-year"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}