What 175 is about — and why the premise hits harder than you'd expect
175 is an eleven-minute thriller produced by Stockholm University of the Arts, built around one of the oldest pressure points in political drama: a child used as a bargaining chip. The setup is clean and brutal — two revolutionaries have kidnapped the child of a Swedish Member of Parliament, and their demand is simple. Kill the vote on a new draconian piece of legislation, or the child doesn't come home. No backstory padding, no slow burn. The film drops you straight into the standoff and trusts you to keep up. What's striking is how much moral weight the premise carries in such a compressed runtime — because the law being opposed is never spelled out in full, which means the audience has to sit with the uncomfortable question of whether the revolutionaries' cause could, under any circumstances, justify what they've done. That ambiguity is the film's sharpest edge.
Behind the making of 175 — Stockholm University of the Arts and the short-film circuit
Produced under the banner of Stockholm University of the Arts, 175 belongs to a tradition of short-form political filmmaking that punches well above its weight class. The school — known locally as SKH — has a track record of nurturing work that's formally rigorous and thematically ambitious, and this 2026 production fits that mold. At eleven minutes, it's the kind of film that gets programmed in festival blocks alongside other shorts, which is where most audiences will first encounter it.
Hard to say if the film has made a full festival run yet, given its 2026 release window, but the short-film circuit in Europe has been increasingly receptive to politically charged genre work. Outlets tracking that space — including destination guides like the True/False Film Fest preview at Destination Film Guide — point to a growing appetite for exactly this kind of compact, high-concept thriller among festival programmers. The 2026 Winter Film Festival circuit has also been surfacing short-form work from European art schools, suggesting 175 could find a natural home in those lineups.
For context, it's worth noting that a separate short film also titled 175 — a 2024 UK drama written and directed by Kasra Karimi, documented on IMDb — has no connection to this production. That film, set in rural Canterbury in winter 2013, follows a lesbian couple waiting for Parliament to legalise same-sex marriage. Different country, different story, different filmmakers. The shared title is coincidence, not franchise. The Stockholm University production is its own thing entirely, and conflating the two would be a mistake. Movie OTT maintains separate entries for both titles to keep the records clean.
As of publication, 175 carries an IMDb rating of 0/10 — which reflects no aggregated user votes yet, not a critical verdict. That's standard for a very new short with limited release exposure.
Why 175 works as a thriller despite — or because of — its eleven-minute runtime
Eleven minutes. That's less time than most feature films spend on their opening credits sequence, and yet 175 uses every second with intention. The thriller genre lives and dies on tension management, and short films are actually a brutal testing ground for that — you can't rely on the slow accumulation of dread that a ninety-minute runtime allows. You have to engineer pressure immediately.
What the film gets right is the specificity of its political context. Sweden. A parliamentary vote. A draconian law that's close enough to passing that two people decided kidnapping a child was the only lever left. That's not a vague dystopian backdrop — it's a recognisable, grounded world, and grounding is what separates political thrillers that land from ones that feel like thought experiments. The revolutionaries aren't coded as straightforwardly heroic or villainous, which is the kind of creative choice that makes a short film linger in your head longer than its runtime suggests it should.
I keep coming back to the structural boldness of opening on the kidnapping already completed. No recruitment scene, no planning montage. The crime is done. What remains is consequence — and that's a genuinely smart place to start a thriller. It shifts the dramatic question from "will they do it?" to "what happens now?", which is a harder, more interesting question to sit with. Movieott.com's editorial team flagged this one early as a title worth watching precisely because short-form thrillers that commit this fully to their premise are rarer than they should be.
Where to stream 175 online right now
The Where-to-Watch widget at the top of this page has the most current, up-to-the-minute picture of where 175 is streaming — Movie OTT tracks availability across major OTT services in real time, so that widget is your best first stop. As of now, 175 is available on major OTT platforms, which for a short film from a European arts institution is a meaningful distribution footprint. Short films have historically struggled to find streaming homes outside of festival platforms, so any presence on a major service is worth noting.
If you're searching on a specific platform and can't locate it, try searching the full title with the year — "175 2026" — to avoid confusion with other titles. Movie OTT's search and filtering tools can also help you narrow by genre and runtime if you're building a short-film watchlist for an evening.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Who made the 2026 short film 175?
175 (2026) is a production of Stockholm University of the Arts, the Swedish performing and fine arts institution known locally as SKH. Specific director and cast credits have not been widely documented in major press as of publication.
Q: How long is 175, and is it a feature film or a short?
175 runs eleven minutes, making it firmly a short film rather than a feature. It was released in 2026 and falls under the thriller genre.
Q: Is the 2026 film 175 related to the 2024 UK short film also called 175?
No — these are two entirely separate productions. The 2024 short, listed on IMDb, was written and directed by Kasra Karimi and is a UK drama about a lesbian couple in rural England. The 2026 175 is a Swedish thriller from Stockholm University of the Arts with a completely different story.
Q: What is 175 (2026) about?
175 follows two revolutionaries in Sweden who have kidnapped the child of a Member of Parliament in an attempt to blackmail them into blocking a vote on a new restrictive law. The film runs eleven minutes and is classified as a thriller.
Q: Where can I watch 175 (2026) online?
The film is currently available on major OTT services. The Where-to-Watch widget at the top of this page on Movie OTT will show you the exact platforms and any regional availability differences in real time.
Final thoughts on 175 — who should seek this one out
If you've got eleven minutes and a taste for political tension done without fuss, 175 earns your time. It's the kind of short film that reminds you the format can do things features can't — the compression isn't a limitation here, it's the point. Fans of Scandinavian crime drama and anyone drawn to morally unresolved thrillers will find something to chew on. Not a comfortable watch. Definitely not trying to be. That's exactly what makes it worth your eleven minutes.