Rock, Paper, Scissors
2024 · 21m · United Kingdom
Directed by Franz Böhm
Tones: contemplative, tender, tense
A father and son in Ukraine confront Russian soldiers in a tense wartime encounter, based on true events.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
War drama based on true events—the most consensus-friendly premise imaginable—but Böhm's refusal to weaponize the encounter, to make it anything other than a devastating game of chance, is genuinely strange and subversive in its restraint.
A formal meditation on contingency and civility under duress, positioned squarely in the lineage of humanist cinema (Kiarostami, Haneke) where dialogue and spatial blocking do the moral work that plot refuses to.
The entire film pivots on a single narrative gamble—that a children's game could be the most honest language available between enemies—and Böhm commits to it with such formal conviction that it transforms what could've been gimmick into something luminous and necessary.
Festivals
- BAFTA 2025, Best British Short Film (winner)
- 98th Academy Awards 2026, Shortlisted - Best Live Action Short