A few weeks after the Sony World Photography Awards named its 2025 winners, its sister competition, the Sony Future Filmmaker Awards, has now revealed its 2025 shortlist.
If the photography awards offer a still frame of our global visual culture, then this is its moving image counterpart; a showcase of emerging cinematic voices and the stories they’re bursting to tell.
Now in its third year, the Sony Future Filmmaker Awards was created by Creo in partnership with Sony, offering a rare platform for new and diverse filmmakers from across the globe.
The scale is impressive, with over 11,750 entries from more than 7,500 filmmakers in 158 countries. And yet what resonates most is the intimacy of the work, which is personal, political, sometimes playful and often profound.
Thirty shortlisted filmmakers across four categories of Fiction, Non-Fiction, Animation and Student have been selected. Each will receive an invitation to Los Angeles, California, this June for a four-day program at Sony Pictures Studios, headlined by the awards ceremony on June 05, where the category winners will be revealed.
Along the way, the filmmakers attend workshops, screenings and talks with industry figures – an immersive step into the heart of Hollywood.
Above: The Shortlist 2025 trailer
In the Fiction category, technological anxiety and emotional nuance often go hand in hand. Fireline follows an inmate firefighter denied parole, caught between inferno and injustice.
The Ballad of Tita and the Machines casts a seasoned fieldworker against her AI substitute, only to find she may be irreplaceable after all. And in Marriage Unplugged, a couple’s intimacy experiment with a sex robot begins to unravel their relationship. These films are short, but expansive in theme and atmosphere.
Animation offers another kind of freedom, and this year’s selections explore grief, memory, and morality in inventive ways. The Day Vladimir Died captures the rhythms of loss and longing in Beirut, while The Big Bad Wolf reimagines a fable of predator and prey inside a pig-run industrial society.
Above: The Trailer for the Future Format winner Select/Or
Student films are often expected to show promise however, they also show precision. Angel in the Stone centers on an autistic teenager whose metalworking skills become a lifeline for her family.
Rock Paper Scissors unfolds in a war hospital where a father and son must face impossible decisions. And in Long Journey Till Dawn, grief takes on a raw, cinematic intensity as a mother wrestles with the loss of her child.
Then there’s the Future Format award, for short films shot entirely on smartphones. This year's winner is Select/Or by Bijan Gashti, which explores the tension between free will and control with limited means but maximum conceptual force. This category further proves the that device in your pocket might just be the next great camera.
Above: The Trailer for Have You Seen The Beast?
As an aspiring documentary filmmaker, it was the Non-Fiction category that resonated most. These films don’t merely inform, but blend documentary fact with cinematic texture in ways that feel both urgent and artful.
What stood out to me was the sensitivity of the approach and the way each work situates its subject within a wider emotional or cultural atmosphere.
From flower growers in Mexico battling toxic chemicals in A Field That No Longer Smells of Flowers, to Travelling Home, a tale of an English Romany Traveller exploring his heritage while making the annual pilgrimage to Appleby Fair.
One film that lingered for me was Have You Seen The Beast? by Will Hewitt and Austen McCowan. Set in rural Wales, close to home for me, it unspools through a series of eerie local phone call testimonies about a mysterious big cat.
What could have tipped into sensationalism is instead handled with restraint and curiosity. In that tension between the mythical and the mundane, the film becomes about more than a creature sighting, it becomes a portrait of belief, folklore, and the stories we share to give shape to uncertainty.
The winners of the Sony Future Filmmaker Awards 2025 will be announced on June 05. Until then, the full list of shortlisted films and filmmakers is available to explore on the Awards website.
you may also like…
Check out our guides to the best Sony cameras and the best cameras for filmmaking.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
