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!

With Resurrection, Bi Gan delivers one of the boldest and most ambitious films of 2025, a hallucinatory odyssey that blurs time, memory, and what it means to be human. Emerging from the festival circuit with notable buzz and a reputation for eliciting polarized reactions, the film asks audiences to surrender to its own shifting realities, promising a unique cinematic experience for those willing to go along for the ride.

Catch Resurrection in theaters beginning December 11th at the Laemmle Royal and December 14th at the Laemmle Glendale, with post-showing Q&As with director Bi Gan following the 7:10 p.m. showing on Saturday the 13th, the 4 p.m. show on the 14th (at the Royal), and both the 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. shows at Glendale on the 14th.

In Resurrection, humanity has traded its ability to dream for immortality. Only one man—an enigma known only as the “Fantasmer,” portrayed by Jackson Yee—continues to dream. His journey propels us through various eras of Chinese history, from silent-film-era tableaux to the turbulence of war, from stylized noir to near-futuristic club scenes. Alongside him, Shu Qi plays a figure from the present who becomes entangled in his visions. Together, they traverse an uncertain landscape where dreams and reality collide, and where cinema becomes the medium for resurrection itself.

Bi Gan builds Resurrection as a kaleidoscopic collage rather than following a traditional narrative. Chapters flit by, each done in its own style: gothic horror, dreamlike fantasy, gritty noir, romantic tragedy, and beyond, each new iteration shifting tone, genre, and even logic itself. Ultimately, the film is less a story than a meditation on history, memory, identity, and the cinematic act. Period-specific cinematography, color palettes, and soundscapes dissolve into one another; time feels elastic, uncanny, haunted. The direction suggests that history isn’t linear, but rather layered, fragmented, haunted by what’s remembered as well as what’s repressed.

That boldness has divided viewers. Some hail the film as a triumph, a vividly realized vision of cinema in all its possibilities, and a sensory experience that stretches the imagination. Others find the abstraction disorienting, the emotional core elusive, or the structure too slippery for narrative comfort. Even among its admirers, there’s a clinging sense that Resurrection demands patience—or better yet, submission to its dream logic.

Still, for fans of experimental cinema, Resurrection feels like a return to something all-too-rare: an audacious and immersive cinematic odyssey that’s unafraid to wander through memory and myth. It isn’t a film to understand so much as feel, one that continues to resonate long after the credits have faded.

For those willing to take the leap, Resurrection poses a haunting question: What if cinema could resurrect not just images, but forgotten dreams? What if memory and desire, when filtered through light and sound, could transcend time? Resurrection doesn’t supply its own answers, but it does offer something even rarer: a place to dream again.

“A marvelously maximalist movie of opulent ambition.” – Jessica Kiang, Variety

“A time-tripping, genre-jumping paean to the big screen.” – Jordan Mintzer, The Hollywood Reporter