MIFF Shorts Awards

MIFF hosts one of the most highly regarded short-film competitions in both the Asia Pacific region and the Southern Hemisphere. You can read the competition’s regulations here.

The winners were announced at a ceremony at Shorts Awards venue partner ACMI on Friday 15 August 2025, with A$50,000 in prize money awarded across multiple categories. They were selected from the main 2025 MIFF Shorts program, which this year boasts over 60 works of short-form content selected from some 36 countries and carefully curated into 10 packaged presentations across animation, experimental, fiction and documentary.

The 2025 Shorts Awards jury comprised filmmaker Audrey Lam (Us and the Night, MIFF 2024); co-founder and Head of Impact Production at Regen Studios Anna Kaplan; and Umbrella Entertainment’s Senior Theatrical Manager, Nikita Leigh-Pritchard.

Shorts Awards winners

City of Melbourne Grand Prix for Best Short Film

Leaving Ikorodu in 1999

Director: Rashida Seriki
Producer: Tobi Kyeremateng

Jury Statement:
As a mother awaits her child in a faraway land, family members question her decision to leave their homeland in pursuit of a better future. Shot in Lagos with a stellar local cast and imbued with late-90s nostalgia, Rashida Seriki’s Leaving Ikorodu in 1999 deftly and tenderly interweaves themes of love, sacrifice and belonging in this emotionally complex and deeply compelling family drama.

VicScreen Erwin Rado Award for Best Australian Short Film

The Eviction

Director: Rebecca Metcalf
Producers: Yiani Andrikidis, David Ma, Rebecca Metcalf

Jury Statement:
The Eviction is an exceptional 14 minutes of socially sharp and conscious storytelling that not only confronts the viewer with a spicy and inflatable ethical dilemma but also challenges our assumptions about justice, virtue signalling and collective responsibility. Drawing from her journalistic roots, Rebecca Metcalf has crafted a gripping and emotionally layered narrative that captures the messy, often uncomfortable intersections of class, identity and group psychology. Her collaborative approach with the cast results in performances that are raw, authentic and unsettlingly familiar. At a time when cultural and political divides feel sharper than ever, this film resonates as both a mirror and a critique of how we navigate truth and accountability in close-knit communities. Bold, intelligent and unflinchingly honest.

Award for Emerging Australian Filmmaker

William Jaka and Fraser Pemberton

Film: Faceless

Jury Statement:
Directors Fraser Pemberton and William Jaka have created a taut, thought-provoking exploration of belonging and assimilation in their gripping short drama Faceless. Jaka’s captivating onscreen portrayal of an Indigenous man journeying through parallel lives invites us to consider notions of class, perception and belonging.

Award for Best Fiction Short Film

Nervous Energy

Director: Eve Liu
Producers: Gregory Barnes, Elias Putnam, Alex Bendo

Jury Statement:
Eve Liu’s irresistibly sharp short is a love letter to artistic ambition, friendship and the beautiful mess of your twenties. Pulsing with the raw energy of youth, Nervous Energy captures the thrill and heartbreak of chasing creative dreams in a city that never stops moving. With razor-sharp wit and a distinct visual flair, Liu crafts a vibrant and chaotic world, anchored by the magnetic chemistry of the film’s two leads and a frenetic big-city backdrop.

Award for Best Documentary Short Film

Razeh-del

Director: Maryam Tafakory
Producer: Leonardo Bigazzi

Jury Statement:
Maryam Tafakory’s Razeh-del is a furtive, layered exploration of gender, censorship and the erasure of women from Iranian film and culture. Through a clandestine conversation between two young women imagining the creation of a film that will never be made, Tafakory expertly reveals the cultural impact of Iran’s first women’s newspaper and its short-lived history in a visually arresting mixed-media collage.

Award for Best Animation Short Film

Murmuration

Directors: Tim Frijsinger, Janneke Swinkels
Producers: Annemie Degryse, Steven De Beul, Ben Tesseur, Peter Lindhout, Tim Frijsinger, Janneke Swinkels

Jury Statement:
Murmuration’s wonderfully poignant and forlorn rendering of its elderly characters as puppets – with their shuffles, stilted gestures and wispy flesh – makes us extra sensitive to our corporeal fragility. The film’s simple yet captivating story draws us into animation’s distinct power to transform and metamorphose.

Award for Best Experimental Short Film

Remote Views

Director & Producer: Alexis McCrimmon

Jury Statement:
The expression and televised transmission of music, performance and protest are revisited as key forces of Black identity in the political turmoil of 1980s America. Alexis McCrimmon’s remarkable and enlivening video essay teases fragments from an archive of 1980s community and broadcast television, then further disrupts these images through elaborate and playful surface distortions. It is these contradictions and tensions that pull us into the filmmaker’s vision while distancing us from the original context of their transmission.

The MIFF Shorts Awards are Academy Awards® accredited. The 2025 winners of the Best Short Film, Best Australian Short Film, Best Documentary Short Film and Best Animation Short Film awards are eligible to submit their films for the 98th Academy Awards® in 2026.

The MIFF Shorts program is also BAFTA Qualifying. Any British film programmed for the 2025 festival is subsequently eligible for entry in the British Short Film and British Short Animation categories of the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards. (More information here.)

See previous winners: