Two boys brutally killed a 2-year-old 26 years ago. An Oscar-nominated film on the case has ‘disgusted’ his mother.

"Detainment," a short film directed and produced by Ireland's Vincent Lambe, was nominated for an Oscar Tuesday despite opposition from the family of James Bulger. (Twelve Media)

The grainy surveillance image was burned into Britain’s collective memory: a tiny boy holding the hand of another, being led out the door of a shopping center near Liverpool.

The seemingly innocuous footage, blasted all over the news in the days after 2-year-old James Bulger disappeared, belied the truth of what happened to him in the hours after the footage was captured. The boy had just gone to the store with his mother on Feb. 12, 1993, to buy pork chops for dinner. Paying at the counter, his mother, Denise Fergus, let go of her son’s hand as she rifled through her purse for change, a split-second decision she would not soon forget. When she looked up again, James was gone.

The search for him played out frantically all across Britain, evolving from the search for a missing boy in a shopping center to the search for an abducted boy in Liverpool and, finally, horrifically, the search for the two boys seen on the surveillance footage leading James away — who were soon suspected of torturing the toddler to death.

They had taken him on a long walk once they left the shopping center, as The Washington Post reported in 1993. They zigzagged through Liverpool for more than two miles, taking James down near the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, making up stories to several passersby who questioned what the 10-year-olds were doing with a crying 2-year-old reeling from a fresh bump on his forehead. No one stopped them. They arrived at a railway embankment. There, out of view from the public, they threw paint in the boy’s eyes, stoned him with bricks and beat him to death with an iron pipe. They left his body on the tracks.

Fergus never wanted to know the details. She did not attend the three-week trial for the 10-year-olds, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who became the youngest convicted killers in Britain in nearly 250 years. She avoided news coverage, as the crime quickly ballooned into one of the most chilling in British history. But some things never went away. The grainy surveillance footage or dramatic depictions of it kept surfacing in places Fergus hated to find it: a crime video game, an Australian TV police drama ― and most recently, an Oscar-nominated short film, “Detainment."

On Tuesday, following the announcement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that the film is a finalist for Best Live Action Short Film, Fergus made her anger internationally known.

The 30-minute picture, produced and written by Ireland’s Vincent Lambe, focuses on the police interrogations of Venables and Thompson and is based on the real transcripts and interview tapes. But to Fergus and to James’s father, Ralph Bulger, the film is deeply upsetting — made worse by the fact that both of them say they were not consulted or made aware of the film before its release.

In a widely shared statement Tuesday on Twitter, Fergus drew attention to a Change.org petition urging that the film be removed from consideration for winning an Oscar and that it not be shown in theaters. As of early Wednesday, more than 97,000 people have signed it.

“I cannot express how disgusted and upset I am at this so-called film that has been made and now nominated for an Oscar,” Fergus said on Twitter. “It’s one thing making a film like this without contacting or getting permission from James’s family but another to have a child reenact the final hours of James’s life before he was brutally murdered and making myself and my family have to relive this all over again!”

In an interview with the Mirror, Ralph Bulger said he had accepted the fact that articles would always be written about his son’s murder, “but to make a film so ­sympathetic to James’s killers is devastating.”