EXCLUSIVE: Netflix has announced the acquisition of two award-winning documentary shorts that should put the streamer squarely back into Oscar contention.

Set to join the platform are an open field, winner of Best Short Documentary at the 2025 International Documentary Festival (IDFA), and One Last Order, which has earned multiple honors including Best Documentary and the Audience Award at the 2026 Aspen Shortsfest, the Short Film Audience Award at the Miami Film Festival, and the Best Documentary Short Audience Award at the Nantucket Film Festival.

Teboho Edkins, director of an open field, tragically lost his brother Max Thabiso Edkins in the catastrophic crash of a Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft in Ethiopia in 2019. The air disaster, caused by the faulty activation of Boeing’s MCAS automated flight software, killed all 157 people on board. Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 went down in an open farm field in the Gimbichu district of Ethiopia.

“In an open field, we learn that dozens of nearby villagers immediately converged on the site to help, and that some stood vigil for a month to protect and preserve the crash area,” notes a synopsis. “Years later, they continue to mourn alongside family members who visit the site, including [director Teboho] Edkins and his father, Don, who produced the film. Boeing’s widely criticized response to the crash stands in sharp contrast to the community’s enduring compassion. Both a personal essay on loss and an exploration of the potential healing power of collective mourning, Edkins’s film is a quiet testament to humanity— moments of warmth, resolve, grief, fear, patience, and simple acts of kindness.”

In a statement, director Teboho Edkins said, “This is a delicate and personal work, and about something fundamental to being human. I hope that the film can find its way to as many people as possible, and that something in it might resonate with them. Having Netflix bring the film to its global audiences is very meaningful to me and I’m grateful for their support as it makes its way out into the world.”

One Last Order, directed by Lauren DeFilippo and Sam Soko, tells an uplifting story from Gainesville, FL. For decades, Sighle (pronounced “Sheila”) Williams has brought joy to her community as a loving and caring presence at a fast-food hamburger stand.

“At Mac’s Drive-Thru in Gainesville, Florida, Sighle Williams is working her final shift after 37 years,” reads the synopsis. “She’s the voice who knows your order before you say it, the smile that turned fast food into something personal. But this isn’t just any farewell. The owner of Mac’s announces every dollar earned that day goes straight to Sighle. Cars wrap around the block. Three-hour waits. All carrying a Sighle story. One Last Order is the story of a woman who met the world with kindness through a drive-thru window and made the most routine moment of someone’s day feel like it counted.”

One Last Order is produced by Lauren DeFilippo, Sam Soko, and Amanda Pollak.

“Sighle remembered every order and every smile. Now we get to celebrate her, and all the other Sighles out there who make an ordinary day feel a little brighter,” observed DeFilippo and Soko. “This film is a love letter to everyday kindness and the people who make ordinary places extraordinary. We’re thrilled Netflix is sharing it with you, too.”

One Last Order is an Insignia Films & LBx Africa production in association with The Harnisch Foundation. Executive producers include Ruth Ann Harnisch, Sam Bisbee, Ron DeFilippo, Bramwel Iro, Stephen Ives.

an open field, meanwhile, is a production of Day Zero Film and Video Productions (South Africa), Day Zero Films UG (Germany), and Survivance (France). Don Edkins and Carine Chichkowsky produced the film.

Netflix has won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short the last two years – All the Empty Rooms in 2026 and The Only Girl in the Orchestra in 2025. It has another Oscar contender lined up with The Baddest Speechwriter of All, which the streamer acquired out of the Sundance Film Festival. That film, directed by two-time Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot and NBA great Stephen Curry, centers on Clarence B. Jones, a key adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who help craft King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

The Baddest Speechwriter of All has claimed numerous awards, including the Grand Jury Prize for Best Short Film at Sundance, and the Jury Prize for Best Short Documentary and the Audience Award for short doc at the Annapolis Film Festival in Maryland.

The next season of the TCM podcast The Plot Thickens will train a spotlight on the famously reclusive, notoriously obsessive Stanley Kubrick.

Hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and made in partnership with the Criterion Collection, the 11-episode “Stanley” premieres Sept. 24 and features excerpts from a never-before-heard 1972 audio interview with the filmmaker conducted by Newsday film critic Joseph Gelmis tied to the release of A Clockwork Orange (1971).

In the interview, Kubrick talks about directing actors, independent filmmaking, football and even his beloved pets, offering a rare glimpse into the mind of one of cinema’s most influential figures.

The podcast also includes Mankiewicz interviews with Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Matthew Modine, Josh Safdie, George Miller, Phil Rosenthal, Michael Bauman and Lee Unkrich; with Kubrick’s stepdaughter, Katharina Kubrick; with longtime Kubrick collaborator James B. Harris; and with authors Claire Dederer and Jon Ronson.

“The Plot Thickens podcast has become one of the most ambitious and rewarding ways we explore the stories behind the people who shape filmmaking, and this season on Stanley Kubrick is a perfect example of that,” Charlie Tabesh, TCM senior vp programming and content strategy, said in a statement.

“The discovery of this previously unheard conversation with Kubrick is truly extraordinary, and alongside new interviews and other archival recordings, it helps create the most complete portrait of the filmmaker possible. As a network dedicated to preserving and celebrating film history, TCM is the ideal home to share a recording like this, pairing Kubrick’s own voice with thoughtful storytelling and the insights of those who knew and studied his work.”

New episodes will be released every Thursday. (Watch the trailer here.)

In conjunction with the seventh season of the podcast, TCM will present every one of Kubrick’s features over four consecutive Thursdays next month, starting at 5 p.m. PST on Sept. 3 with Killer’s Kiss (1955).

Viewers also will be treated to Fear and Desire (1952), The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Two of his short films, Day of the Fight and Flying Padre, both from 1951, will also be screened.

Criterion, which put out The Killing and Paths of Glory on laserdisc back in the day, will release a “Complete Kubrick” special edition box set in October.

Previous Plot Thickens seasons have focused on Peter Bogdanovich, the 1990 film The Bonfire of the Vanities, Lucille Ball, Pam Grier, John Ford and the making of Cleopatra (1963).

Camille Delamarre will direct Andrea Iervolino’s sports car movie Bugatti: The Final Race.

The director of pics such as Brick Mansions, The Transporter Refueled and Assassin Club will direct based on an English-language story from producer Iervolino about the life of race car driver Ettore Bugatti. The Andrea Iervolino American Company is producing.

We first reported on the Bugatti movie in 2024, at which point frequent Iervolino collaborator Bobby Moresco was expected to be scripting the project. A rep today confirmed to Deadline that Iervolino is now scripting the film himself alongside Albert Ferrari. This marks the first time Iervolino has taken a writing credit on one of his pics.

Iervolino is known for bringing films about other classic Italian car brands Lamborghini, Ferrari and Maserati to the screen. The Bugatti story will be set in Paris, in 1947, where Bugatti is living out his last months in an apartment where past and present blur into one. He has one final race ahead of him: To win back Molsheim – the factory, and the name, that were taken from him.

For Iervolino, the film is the final circuit on a tour that began with 2022’s Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend, starring Frank Grillo, and was followed by Michael Mann’s Ferrari, starring Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz, and and Maserati: The Brothers, directed by Bobby Moresco with Anthony Hopkins, Michele Morrone, Andy García, Al Pacino and Jessica Alba starring.

“With Lamborghini, Ferrari and Maserati I told the story of the Italian obsession with speed,” said Iervolino. “Bugatti is something else: It is art applied to an engine, a man who designed cars the way others carve sculpture, and who paid for that dream with the loss of his son.

“I have carried this story with me for years, and for the first time I felt the need to write it myself, together with Alberto Ferrari. Then I needed a director who could put speed in the audience’s stomach and, at the same time, hold the silence of a family tragedy. Camille has spent twenty years building a language of movement. He is the right man for this race.”

Delamarre added: “I grew up a few kilometres from the Bugatti legend, and for me Molsheim is not just a name: It is the place where impossible objects were built. When I read Andrea and Alberto’s screenplay I found exactly what I was looking for – a film in which the cars are not scenery, they are characters.

“We will shoot with real machines, in real places, because you cannot fake the sound of a 1939 straight-eight. But the race that interests me most is the one between a father and a son: Two men chasing the same perfection from opposite directions, with far less time than they think.”