Saoirse Ronan's 'Paper Plane' Wins Austin, Gains 2027 Oscar Eligibility

Saoirse Ronan's first film as director, the 15-minute short "Paper Plane," won Best Narrative Short at the Austin Film Festival this month. Because Austin is an Oscar-qualifying festival, the film is now eligible for consideration at the 2027 Academy Awards ceremony. It debuted earlier in the season at Venice.

Ronan also wrote the script. The film stars Martha Malone as Fay, Clare Dunne as Mam and Tim Creed as Dad. Fay launches a silent protest, announcing by paper plane message that she won't return home until her father, a toxic presence, leaves for good. She waits it out with her dog in a grassy lot across the street. The press notes call the film "a love letter to your younger self."

Behind the camera, Ronan assembled producer Shirin Eren (who produced her film "The Outrun"), IFTA-winning editor Nathan Nugent, and cinematographer Kate McCullough. She announced her feature ambitions plainly: "Yeah, I do. I do want to do a feature."

Why direct now?

Ronan told IndieWire the timing came down to life stage. "I was married, becoming a parent. Change was on the horizon," she said. "If I don't do it now, who knows when I'll do it." She has wanted to direct since childhood, before she even became an actor, and has been influenced by directors she has worked with since age 10.

A push came from an unexpected quarter: Eliza Scanlen, her "Little Women" co-star, who has already made three shorts. "If Eliza's doing it, I have no excuse," Ronan said.

Writing, she discovered, is genuinely difficult. "Writing's just really hard," she said. "As the Italians say, piano, piano, little by little, you take a step forward, and you take two steps back." For a future feature, she wants to collaborate with a professional writer rather than go it alone.

What choices shaped the film?

Two decisions mattered most. Tonally, Ronan pursued magical realism — she wanted the story seen only through a child's eyes, heightened but not fantasy. The paper planes came from her own childhood: she used to throw apology notes at her mother from around a corner, then run back to her room.

She also refused to villainize the father. "It was also very important to me that the father role was never vilified," she said. The focus belongs on the love between mother and daughter. Becoming a mother herself convinced her that "you don't ever stop being a child," and she wanted the two characters to remind each other of their inner child.

Whose sets did she copy?

Ronan borrowed from Joe Wright's on-the-ground clarity and his habit, shared with Peter Jackson, of playing music live on set. From Greta Gerwig she took a single maxim: think of yourself as the most supportive audience member for your actors. She ranks Gerwig and John Crowley above anyone she has worked with as actor-directors.

The surprise was that directing actors made her most nervous. Everything else — crew management, scheduling with her first AD, working with the production designer — felt natural. Her diagnosis: "The skill of being a director is to surround yourself with really, really, really brilliant people who know what they're doing and to have good taste."

What's next?

She made the short partly as a test: to learn her style, strengths and weaknesses before directing a feature. "I didn't want to put anyone else in that position," she said. She now has a rough idea of what the feature will be, and knows it will become what it is meant to become.