2027 Oscars Short Film Contenders: ‘Acid City’ Directors Jack Wedge And Will Freudenheim

Acid City is a 3D animated documentary short that follows a film crew documenting one day in a fictional city adrift on a vast acidic ocean. It combines real interviews recorded in New York with imagi

The camera travels to a city floating alone above a vast acidic sea. *Acid City* follows a film crew documenting residents’ lives over the course of a day, constructing a post-disaster world through the voices of everyday life rather than grand heroic tales. The isolated environment becomes a starting point for asking how this city survives and what its residents rely on one another for.

Real Interviews and a Fictional City

The short’s central device is its transfer of real voices into an imaginary space. Interviews collected in New York with ordinary citizens, water scientists, and emergency responders are mixed with the voices of fictional characters. As a result, although the city on screen is fictional, the words about water, pollution, and extreme heat retain the texture of a documentary. Through this contrast, directors Jack Wedge and Will Freudenheim treat future disasters not as an abstract backdrop but as a concrete environment in which people adapt.

Distance and Density Created by 3D Animation

The 12-minute-30-second film was made with 3D computer animation. Instead of reproducing the real interviews literally, it builds an acidified sea and a city operating independently, layering the factual quality of documentary filmmaking with the world-building of science fiction in a single frame. While incorporating the perspectives of scientists and emergency responders, it avoids reducing its conclusion to a simple warning, focusing instead on the city’s self-sufficiency and resilience amid extreme heat and water scarcity.

A Community’s Questions About Water

The story’s tension arises from the city’s condition of floating on an acidic sea, but its focus lies less on the catastrophe itself than on the relationships sustained within it. By placing real interviews alongside imagined characters, the film encourages viewers to see the climate crisis not merely as a setting in the distant future, but also to connect it with how cities today manage water and heat. Unlike the imagery of collapse common in disaster narratives, this is a choice to turn attention toward the process by which communities organize everyday life.

Source: Miyu Distribution work description · Annecy Festival technical information · Original Cartoon Brew article