Our new Screening Room short, “Stutterer,” won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film this year. It’s a thirteen-minute movie about a young London typographer named Greenwood (Matthew Needham). Greenwood stutters, to the extent that verbal conversation is difficult. When he tries to resolve an issue with a service representative over the phone, he can’t get the words out; the operator, gruff and impatient, hangs up. (For surliness, she rivals the operator in the old Yaz song.) When a woman approaches Greenwood on the street, he uses sign language to avoid talking. But in his thoughts, which we hear, he does not stutter. And when he chats online with a woman named Ellie (Chloe Pirrie) he can express himself freely, and is casual, charming, and content. When Ellie writes that she’s coming to London, he panics. How he navigates her visit provides the film’s narrative and emotional suspense.

The writer and director of “Stutterer,” Benjamin Cleary, is a thirty-two-year-old graduate of University College Dublin and of the London Film School. He now lives in Dublin. Cleary is not a stutterer himself. “I had a friend growing up who had a pretty severe stutter,” he told me recently. “So I got to see firsthand what it would be like for someone, and what it would be like growing up. You know, it’s hard enough being a kid.” Years later, he watched an interview online with a man who had a stutter. “He said he’d gotten to the point where he was able to talk face to face with people fine, but when the phone became involved, he really struggled and would clam up—his voice was on show, no eye contact or anything,” Cleary said. “It struck a chord with me.” That, along with his childhood friendship, “put me in a place where I felt I was in a good position to explore it.” “Stutterer” is his first film as a director. At the time, he was working in a friend’s pop-up restaurant in London, and sharing a studio space with other young filmmakers, designers, and photographers. “I wrote the first draft quickly, in a week or so,” he said. “And I had a couple of mates who produced it.” (Shan Christopher Ogilvie and Serena Armitage.)

The casting director, Irene Cotton, suggested Needham, who was acting in a play at Shakespeare’s Globe. “In rehearsals, we put all our time into making the stuttering authentic,” Cleary said. They studied tapes and came up with rules for the sounds Greenwood would get caught on. “We knew it had to be quite severe, for him to be quite isolated, to suit the story.” The character is so isolated, with such a haunted look in his eyes, that I wondered at times if real-life stutterers might feel patronized. I asked Cleary how stutterers have reacted. “We’ve had a really positive response,” he said. “When you make something like this, you’re nervous, and you want to make sure you do it in a very sensitive way.” And you want it to reflect true experience. “Showing it to my friend who grew up with a stutter was one of the most nerve-racking click-send moments of my life.” His friend loved the film, he said, “which was a massive weight off my shoulders.” Two weeks ago, Cleary went to Basel, Switzerland, to attend Look & Roll, a film festival primarily for films that explore disabilities. “It was nice to be included in that,” Cleary said. “We were interviewed by a really nice guy who had a stutter.”

When the film was nominated for an Oscar, Cleary was unaware that the shortlist was coming out that day. “I got a hundred e-mails in six minutes,” he said. “It was just so unexpected and so lovely. All we wanted for the film was to get into a couple of festivals.” The experience was wonderful, he said. “The whole thing—the way it happened was just like a magical dream. Not to sound too cheesy about it.” He keeps the Oscar at his parents’ house. (“My mum has it on her desk!”)

Currently, he’s writing a feature—a sci-fi drama called “Swan Song.” He’s also opened a commercial production studio. (“Got to make a few quid,” he said.) Meanwhile, his short “Love Is a Sting” has been long-listed for this year’s Academy Awards. “It’s live-action with a little bit of animation in it,” Cleary told me. “It’s about a hyper-intelligent mosquito who’s got supernatural genes, and she’s been travelling the globe for about twenty years. It’s the story of when she first tries to communicate with a human.” Communication, like love, is never easy.