PRESS
Spike Lee, Joan Chen Board Liz Rao’s Short ‘The Truck,’ a Post-Roe Thriller, as EPs — Georg Szalai, The Hollywood Reporter
”Our narrative award went to Elizabeth Rao’s “The Truck,” a film that works in both the micro and the macro, telling a story of two teenagers (Shirley Chen & Daniel Zolghadri) trying to obtain a morning-after pill in an area of the country where that’s becoming increasingly difficult. Beautifully shot and tenderly performed, it’s a special short." — Brian Tallerico, Roger Ebert.com
“Blends the romance of Americana—open roads, convenience-store lights, dusty afternoons—with the lurking menace of a country tightening its grip on bodily autonomy.
Verdict: A Quiet Thunderbolt. The Truck feels like a fuse lit at exactly the right cultural moment. 10/10.”
— Jane Broder, Arts Muse Magazine, Film Review: The Truck — Fierce, Intimate Short Poised for Oscar Attention, Powered by a Rising Female Director
“‘The Truck” arrives with the urgency of a headline and the intimacy of a diary entry.
Shirley Chen and Daniel Zolghadri deliver emotionally raw, quietly devastating performances that ground the political in the personal.”
— Nolan Carr, We Love Short Film, Oscar Momentum Builds for Liz Rao’s Unshakable ‘The Truck’
“Rao’s film is raw, immediate, and unapologetically political, yet grounded in a deeply human love story. The stakes are personal, emotional, and heartbreakingly current.
The Truck stands firmly in the lineage of socially vital cinema.”
— Film and TV Business, Awards Spotlight: The Four Oscar-Qualified Shorts Redefining Awards Season Storytelling
“Suspended between memory and modern anxiety, warm, grain-like textures overlaying a steadily building sense of dread.
Rao frames the story through lived emotional detail, small, uncomfortable, painfully real moments that reveal how national headlines transform into intimate, personal stakes.”
— Arts Muse Magazine, Liz Rao Emerges as a Defining New Voice With Her Oscar-Qualified Short ‘The Truck’
”In an era when reproductive rights in the United States are increasingly contested, Liz Rao’s “The Truck” arrives with the clarity and force of a filmmaker who understands both the urgency of the moment and the quietness with which fear often settles into the lives of young people.
She captures the way girls learn to assess danger, the ways they whisper their fears, the ways their bodies move through spaces where authority is both omnipresent and opaque.
The film is not simply about a young couple trying to secure a morning after pill, it is about the surveillance of female bodies in a country sliding backwards, and the deeply human cost of that regression.”
— Film and TV Business, The Truck — Liz Rao’s Fierce, Tender Entry into Asian American Cinema and the Academy Awards
“Sometimes you don’t realize how big moments of your life force you to grow up. We are so jolted by worry or stress as we experience something, we don’t notice that our souls expand a little bit more.”
— Joey Moser , The Contending, Liz Rao On Growing Up In Unexpected Places for ‘The Truck’
— Ward Bond, Bond on Cinema
“ Rao delivers a sharp, urgent, and human portrait of young people coming of age in a country where their rights are increasingly contested.”
— We Love Short Films, The New Wave: Female Directors Reshaping Cinema for the Next Generation
The Oscar Project Podcast, Filmmaker Interview with Liz Rao
WE LOVE SHORT FILMS favorite OSCAR-Qualified Short Films of 2025
OSCAR CONTENDING SERIES – Filmmaker Liz Rao on Power, Adolescence, and Post-Roe America