MIFF 2025 Short Award Winners Announced – The Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) has tonight unveiled the winners of its Academy Awards® accredited and BAFTA qualifying, MIFF Shorts Awards for 2025. Winners were announced at a ceremony at ACMI on Friday evening with $50,000 in prize money awarded across multiple categories.
Recognised as one of the most highly regarded short-film competitions in the Asia Pacific and the Southern Hemisphere, tonight’s MIFF Shorts Awards celebrated the standout works from the festival’s much-loved shorts program. This year’s program showcased over 60 short films from 36 countries, presented across 9 curated packages, including a dedicated screening of the award winners with a Best MIFF Shorts package screening at the end of the festival.
Now in its 64th year, the MIFF Shorts Awards celebrates the art of saying more with less, and has long been a beloved part of the MIFF program highlighting up and coming filmmakers from the region and internationally. Championing bold and impactful storytelling in short form, the program features animation, documentary, experimental works, and Australian and international fiction shorts.
”Given the rich diversity in form, genre and tone across this year’s films, our Shorts Awards Jury were certainly presented with a challenge in deliberating on the work,”
– said MIFF Program Coordinator Liam Carter and Critics Campus and Shorts Coordinator, Luke Goodsell.
”We’re immensely pleased with their selections, a group of films that reflect our programming vision to highlight original voices, new perspectives, and work that moves cinema forward into the future.”
The 2025 MIFF Shorts Awards Jury brought together filmmaker Audrey Lam (Us and the Night, MIFF 2024); Anna Kaplan, co-founder and Head of Impact Production at Regen Studios; and Nikita Leigh-Pritchard, Senior Theatrical Manager at Umbrella Entertainment, to determine this year’s winners.
The 2025 MIFF Shorts Award winners follow.
City of Melbourne Grand Prix for Best Short Film
$12,500 cash prize
Leaving Ikorodu in 1999 by Rashida Seriki
UK, Nigeria | 18 mins
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
$7,500 cash prize
The Eviction by Rebecca Metcalf
Australia | 14 mins
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
$6,000 cash prize
William Jaka and Fraser Pemberton for Faceless
Australia | 28 mins
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
$6,000 cash prize
Nervous Energy by Eve Liu
USA | 15 mins
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
$6,000 cash prize
Razeh-del by Maryam Tafakory
Iran, UK, Italy | 28 mins
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
$6,000 cash prize
Murmuration by Janneke Swinkels and Tim Frijsinger
Belgium, Netherlands | 12 mins
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
$6,000 cash prize
Remote Views by Alexis McCrimmon
USA | 15 mins
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.”
Media Release – Melbourne International Film Festival
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MIFF 2025 Short Award Winners Announced
