Academy-Honored Shorts ‘Butterfly’ And ‘Gauze’ Use Water, Memory, And Animation To Confront Genocide

Earlier this year, Florence Miailhe’s exquisitely crafted animated Holocaust short Butterfly was nominated for an Academy Award. This week, Gauze, a 2D Gobelins graduation film about a Palestinian child trying to survive the genocide in Gaza, won a Student Academy Award, making it eligible for consideration at next year’s Oscars.

Both films are available online, and both are essential watches. The proximity of their honors is striking, as are the narrative parallels between them.

Butterfly tells the true story of Alfred Nakache, the Jewish Olympic swimmer who survived Auschwitz, where his wife and daughter were murdered. Miailhe presents his life as a succession of memories connected by water. In it, swimming represents moments of freedom, ambition, love, persecution, and survival. The water carries an adult Nakache between the man he became and back to the young man he once was.

Competitive swimming is similarly central to Gauze, directed by Noran Fikri Alezabi, Xinyue Ma, and Yulin Yue. But in this case, there is no reassuring distance afforded by history between the film and the events it depicts. Its protagonist, Zain, is a 14-year-old Palestinian swimming champion whose dreams have been displaced by hunger and war. Responsible for his six-year-old brother, he enters the sea to recover air-dropped humanitarian aid. He is no longer swimming toward a finish line but toward the possibility of surviving another day. The film was inspired by the real Zain Orouq, a Palestinian teenager killed in 2024 while seeking aid.

In both films, water becomes a conduit into fonder memories of a time before their protagonists’ lives were shattered by man-made atrocities. But while Butterfly looks back at one of the darkest periods in modern history, Gauze shows the real human toll of war in the present tense. One film preserves the memory of a horror that the world has learned to commemorate; the other confronts us with a horror that many still refuse to recognize.

Animation is an exceptional medium for preserving memory, allowing viewers to visualize trauma and recognize lives that history might otherwise reduce to statistics. Butterfly demonstrates why that work remains essential in how we remember history. Gauze asks us what the value is of remembering past atrocities if those memories don’t push us to prevent similar horrors from unfolding in our own time.