Each year, the Academy’s documentary and international feature shortlists offer an early snapshot of the stories, styles, and concerns shaping global cinema. This season, 15 documentaries and 15 international features have advanced to the shortlist stage in their respective categories, from which just five nominees apiece will ultimately be selected. Reaching this point alone signals extraordinary distinction, marking these films as some of the most resonant and accomplished works released worldwide this year.
Documentary Features
Brandon Kramer’s Holding Liat follows the family of Liat Beinin Atzili after she is taken hostage from her kibbutz during the October 7th attacks, capturing the emotional toll of waiting while navigating grief, fear, and fragile hope. Kramer avoids sensationalism, allowing viewers to feel the weight of time as it stretches unbearably forward. Holding Liat returns to Laemmle Theatres on January 16th, with advance shows featuring Q&As with the filmmakers at Glendale on January 14th and the Royal on the 15th.
Brittany Shyne’s Seeds offers a lyrical portrait of Black farmers in the American South, tracing generations of agricultural knowledge passed down through land, labor, and memory. Shot in black-and-white, the film observes these farmers’ daily rituals (planting, harvesting, repairing equipment) with reverence and care while more broadly addressing the systemic forces that have threatened Black land ownership for decades. Shyne’s approach is contemplative rather than didactic, allowing the resilience, dignity, and perseverance of her subjects to speak for themselves. Seeds opens at Laemmle’s Glendale January 23rd.
International Features — Returning to Laemmle Theatres in early January 2026
Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice (South Korea), adapted from Donald Westlake’s 1997 novel The Axe, offers a bleakly comic portrait of economic precarity pushed to its logical extremes. The film centers on Man-su, a longtime paper company employee whose comfortable life unravels after a corporate buyout leaves him unemployed. As financial pressure threatens his home and family, Man-su’s desperation hardens into calculation, leading him on a methodical, morally chilling effort to ‘eliminate’ rival job candidates, reframing professional competition as literal survival.
In The President’s Cake (Iraq), Hasan Hadi offers a deceptively simple coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of authoritarian rule. Told through the eyes of a young girl tasked with baking a cake to honor Saddam Hussein, the film balances innocence and menace, revealing how political power infiltrates even the smallest rituals of childhood.
In Oliver Laxe’s Sirat (Spain), middle-aged dad Luis travels with his son Esteban to a rave in southern Morocco in search of his missing daughter, only to be swept into a nomadic convoy pushing deeper into an increasingly unstable landscape. As rumors of global conflict spread and the desert becomes increasingly militarized, the narrative shifts from communal drift to stark survival. When tragedy fractures the group, Sirat becomes a meditation on grief and forward motion, asking what it means to keep walking when meaning itself has collapsed.
Petra Volpe’s Late Shift (Switzerland) turns its attention to the pressures of contemporary labor, unfolding over the course of a single night in a Swiss hospital. With mounting urgency, the film observes a nurse pushed to her limits by understaffing and impossible demands. Volpe’s clear-eyed direction transforms everyday professional stress into a gripping ethical drama about care, responsibility, and systemic neglect.
Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You (Jordan) centers on a Palestinian teenager swept into a protest in the Occupied West Bank, where a sudden act of violence sends shockwaves through his family. From that rupture, the narrative expands outward as his mother recounts the personal and political forces that shaped the critical moment, threading past and present together. Rather than offering a single perspective, the film unfolds as an act of bearing witness, honoring survival not as abstraction, but as something lived, remembered, and passed down.
Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36 (Palestine) revisits the 1936-39 Arab Revolt against British colonial rule, foregrounding the human cost of resistance and focusing on intimate relationships shaped by betrayal, loyalty, and survival. Jacir brings emotional depth and political clarity to a story rarely depicted on screen, offering a work that feels both historically grounded and urgently contemporary.
Together, these shortlisted films reflect a cinema attuned to moral complexity and the enduring consequences of power, memory, and choice. Catch them in theaters before awards season really takes off!
Happy Holidays!