Watch: Trailers For The Oscar-nominated Short Films, Which Are Coming To Theatres January 29

One of the best things about the Academy Awards is the way they can shine a light on films and filmmakers who would otherwise not get much attention.

Case in point: the short film awards.

Every year, the Academy nominates five animated shorts, five live-action shorts, and five documentary shorts — and every year, the ShortsHD cable channel packages them together and sends these programs to theatres around the world, thereby allowing moviegoers everywhere to catch up on these otherwise obscure categories.

This year’s nominees will start playing in theatres on January 29, nearly one month before the winners are announced February 28.

And this year, there are at least two short films that deal with religious themes.

You might have seen one of them already: Sanjay’s Super Team, the first Pixar film to be nominated in this category in four years, played in theatres before The Good Dinosaur last year and concerns a first-generation Indian-American boy who would rather watch superhero cartoons than join his father in Hindu prayers.

The other religious-themed short film is a live-action nominee: Ave Maria concerns a family of Israeli settlers who seek help from some Palestinian nuns when their car breaks down. Two slight problems: the religiously observant Jewish settlers cannot use the phone on the Sabbath, while the nuns have taken a vow of silence.

Here are the trailers for the nominees. First, the dramatic live-action shorts:

Ave Maria, directed by Basil Khalil and Eric Dupont:

Day One, directed by Henry Hughes:

Everything Will Be Okay (Alles Wird Gut), directed by Patrick Vollrath:

Shok, directed by Jamie Donoughue:

Stutterer, directed by Benjamin Cleary and Serena Armitage:

Second, the documentary shorts:

Body Team 12, directed by David Darg and Bryn Mooser:

Chau Beyond the Lines, directed by Courtney Marsh and Jerry Franck:

Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, directed by Adam Benzine:

Last Day of Freedom, directed by Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman:

And A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.

And last but certainly not least, the animated films:

Bear Story, directed by Gabriel Osorio and Pato Escala:

Prologue, directed by Richard Williams and Imogen Sutton:

Sanjay’s Super Team, directed by Sanjay Patel and Nicole Grindle:

We Can’t Live Without Cosmos, directed by Konstantin Bronzit:

World of Tomorrow, directed by Don Hertzfeldt:

The five animated nominees come to only 57 minutes or so combined, so it’s possible that ShortsHD will pad out the program by including some of the other shortlisted films that weren’t nominated. The list of potential bonus films includes:

If I Was God…, directed by Cordell Barker: