Dutch director Victoria Warmerdam has won the Oscar for best short film at the glittering awards ceremony on Sunday

Ik ben geen geen robot (I am not a robot) is a dark comedy in which a woman fails a series of captcha tests and begins to suspect she might be a robot after all. In the space of just 20 minutes, the film explores identity, feminism and concerns over AI.

In her acceptance speech, Warmerdam thanked lead actress Ellen Parren and the rest of the cast and crew for “putting their heart and soul in every frame of this film”. She told producer and partner Trent Warmerdam that “we no-nonsense Dutch don’t say it enough but I love you.”

Warmerdam said the Oscar felt unreal, “particularly since no Dutch short films had been nominated since the 1960s. “We were proud to even be here. To win feels unreal,” she told the AD.

Warmerdam said the prize is a boost to the Dutch film industry. “And that’s good because we have a lot of talented filmmakers in the Netherlands. This gives us hope our films can reach a broad audience,” she told the paper.

Standup comedian Henry van Loon, who played opposite Parren, called the Oscar a “once-in-a-lifetime holy-shit-what-the-fuck-moment”. “I’m very proud of our team and Ellen is the star. My role was relatively small,” he said.

The second Dutch nomination, the animated short film Wander to Wonder directed by Nina Gantz, lost out to the Iranian In the Shadow of the Cypress, directed by Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani.