Oscar-qualified short Never Give Up!, from writer-director Tamás Yvan Topolánszky, is heading into awards season with a deceptively simple question at its heart: Do words belong to the person who speaks them, or the person who hears them?
Produced by Tamás Yvan Topolánszky and Claudia Sümeghy, the film stars 9-year-old Mexican newcomer José María Gómez “Chema” alongside award-winning Dominican actress Ariana Lebrón.
After a young boy is separated from his mother during a deadly border crossing, he is left alone in the desert with a damaged phone and one of the most overused phrases in American culture – the words his mother taught him to live by: Never give up.
As exhaustion closes in, those same words unexpectedly return through an old motivational video. The boy knows nothing about the man speaking them. He simply recognises his mother’s message in another voice.
The film explores how language can take on an entirely different meaning depending on who is listening. The same sentence can be a slogan, an empty cliché or, for someone desperately in need of hope, a lifeline.
The idea for Never Give Up! first emerged during the 2015 refugee crisis in Budapest, where Topolánszky became interested in the gap between political language and individual human experience.
Against the politics of the U.S.–Mexico border, Never Give Up! remains rooted in an intimate story about hope, loss and the strange afterlife of words.
Topolánszky’s debut feature CURTIZ, about the making of the Hollywood classic Casablanca, won the Grand Prix at the Montreal World Film Festival before being acquired by Netflix for worldwide release.
His 2026 political documentary Spring Wind – The Awakening, about opposition leader Péter Magyar – who has since become Prime Minister – became Hungary’s most-watched theatrical documentary and reached more than 3.4 million online viewers in the days before the national election that ended Viktor Orbán’s 16 years in power. Magyar later said the documentary had played a “decisive role” in the election victory. For Topolánszky, the experience reinforced a belief in cinema’s ability to move beyond the screen and enter the wider public conversation – something that also informs Never Give Up! as the film enters its U.S. awards campaign this fall.
Producer Claudia Sümeghy, co-founder of JUNO11 Pictures, has produced feature films including Curtiz, Heights and Depths and the European Film Academy-nominated I Accidentally Wrote a Book.
Never Give Up! marks the acting debut of José María Gómez “Chema,” a multilingual 9-year-old Mexican actor who speaks Spanish, English and Hungarian. Ariana Lebrón, whose credits include FBI: International, Flor de Azúcar and The Original, plays his mother. A graduate of London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Lebrón provides the emotional foundation to a story in which a mother’s simple words continue to resonate long after she is gone.
Never Give Up! was recently named one of the Top 10 Live Action finalists at the Oscar®-qualifying HollyShorts Film Festival, emerging from approximately 8,000 festival entries to compete for the Grand Prix and Best Live Action awards, further propelling Never Give Up! into the awards-season conversation.
Now Oscar-qualified, Never Give Up! leaves audiences with the provocative question at its heart:
Who owns a message – the person who says it, or the person who gives it meaning?
