TEHRAN-A short animation from Iran and a feature film from Palestine have found their way into the shortlist of their respected category for the upcoming 97th Oscars ceremony.

According to the announcement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Iranian short animation “In the Shadow of the Cypress” directed by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani is among the 15 animated short films and “From Ground Zero” from Palestine is present in the shortlist of international feature category, ILNA reported.

 “In the Shadow of the Cypress” is a complex story of family relationships. When the distance grows between the characters, an unexpected event brings them together again in an exceptionally beautifully written and illustrated way.

Made in 2023, it depicts a former captain suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who lives with his daughter in a humble house located by the sea. Together, they live isolated from the world and must confront the challenges of their situation. One morning, their lives change forever when an unforeseen event occurs.

A production of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (known as Kanoon), the animated movie has so far grabbed several major international awards.

“In the Shadow of the Cypress” recently won the Best Animated Short Film Award at the 27th Olympia International Film Festival for Children and Young People in Pyrgos, Greece, earlier this month.

It also won two silver awards in the categories of Best 2D Animated Short and Best Score in a Short Animation at the 12th Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology (PFCAT), in the U.S. in August.

“From Ground Zero” is a 2024 anthology film directed by 22 different Palestinian directors. The film is made up of 22 short films, including documentaries, fiction, animation and experimental films about the current situation of the people of Gaza in the midst of the Israel-Hamas War.

It premiered at the 5th Amman International Film Festival in July and had its North American premiere at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival in September as part of the TIFF Docs section. 

Initiated by Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi, the project was born to give a voice to 22 Gazan filmmakers to tell the untold stories of the current war on film.

After the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, Masharawi founded the Masharawi Fund for Cinema and Filmmakers in Gaza with the purpose of supporting young Palestinian filmmakers to express themselves and tell their stories through cinema. Masharawi supported the production and post-production of the 22 short films that make up From Ground Zero filmed in different parts of the Gaza Strip at the end of 2023.

A filmmaker burns his clapperboard for warmth. A schoolteacher scavenges to feed his students. A stand-up comedian arrives at a gig to find the venue bombed. In “From Ground Zero,” the directors present cinematic diaries from Gaza, shot in between (and sometimes, during) IDF bombing raids to weave a portrait of life under siege. Each short is unique in its conception, and yet, is bound by a common resilience, and a need to document the violent interruption of life and routine.

Stricken from the Cannes lineup back in May on political grounds, the anthology was screened just outside the festival as an act of protest: a fitting premiere for a defiant act of creativity in the face of genocide. “From Ground Zero” brings dozens of emerging artists to the fore, as they present digital memories and DIY chronicles of modern life in the Gaza Strip. The shorts range from a couple of minutes in length to nearly ten. Some are charming and wistful, like Reema Mahmoud’s opening documentary portrait “Selfies,” about a young woman using makeup to disguise her stress and retain a sense of femininity as the world crumbles around her. Others, like Muhammad Alshareef’s “No Signal”— which immediately follows “Selfies” — use the rubble of collapsed buildings to stage intense fictitious scenes drawn from reality.

None of these stories or approaches ever feel incongruous with one another, or with the overall project. In fact, their variety is the point, as each one depicts a different facet of social and personal life in its creators’ vicious new realities, whether they deal with death in the abstract — as in Kareem Satoum’s absurd “Hell’s Heaven,” in which a man sleeps in a body bag for comfort — or with grief as their new normal. It’s a wonder only one of the films in the lineup is left incomplete, with its director showing up on screen to detail her original plans before her loved ones were killed in a manner that rendered her project too painful to approach.

While most footage is contemporaneous, a number of shorts feature brief flashbacks or superimposed images of life before the start of the Israel-Hamas War, imbuing the project with a palpable sense of loss — that of the subjects’ social lives, and of their loved ones. And yet, “From Ground Zero” contains, within its many cuts to black between each short, a sense of history. The artists may have been exposed to cruel new extremes, but their sense of confinement, and their familiarity with war, goes back years — if not decades — a subject broached in poetic fashion by Mahdi Karirah’s haunting concluding chapter “Awakening,” told with marionettes made of scraps.

The filmmaking ingenuity on display is undoubtedly impressive, but it’s self-reflexive too, between the lo-fi digital quality of most shorts and the sense that the movie’s very texture is a commentary too. The digital world has been Palestine’s smoke-signal amidst ongoing atrocities. Many snippets of Gaza’s plight have made their way onto social media (one in particular, of a man being rescued from the debris of his home, is the subject of one story in the film), but few of these fleeting clips have provided such an in-depth look at the lives of Gaza’s citizens. The psychological impact of their plight is made detailed and evident, but so is their hope in the face of doom.

The Oscar nominations will be announced on January 17, 2025. The 2025 Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 2, 2025.

SS/SAB