Short Film Contenders Pt 1. Who Will Win?
Thursday, February 25, 2016 at 10:30AM 
Eric Blume reporting for duty. We hadn't yet reviewed the short film Oscar nominees so I binged all 15 of this week. Many minds and bladders wander away from the Oscar telecast during these three categories. Even those of us who claim we’ve “seen everything” have rarely seen all of the entries in the three shorts fields. But pay attention because these winners can bring some of the best moments of the show: remember the 1991 show when producer Debra Chasnoff won for Documentary Short Subject for the General Electric expose Deadly Deception? She got to the podium and said “boycott GE!” with a cut to Barbra Streisand smiling and clapping with Kevin Costner right behind her decidedly smiling and not clapping. We Oscar lovers live for moments like this.
There’s a lot of quality among the three categories this year. Here’s a quick overview as well as thoughts on who might prevail and why on two of the categories.
Documentary Short Subject
Body Team 12 follows the only female Liberian Red Cross member of a team which comes to remove dead bodies during the Ebola outbreak. It’s the shortest of the five nominees at only 13 minutes, and therefore it doesn’t have a strong driving narrative, nor does it culminate in a larger meaning. It simply follows the team while they gear up and remove the bodies, interspersed with an interview from its main subject. It’s focused and lovely in its simplicity, but it suffers from its brevity.
Pro: Ebola. Con: Uncomplicated.
A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness follows Saba, a Pakastani girl who is shot and left for dead by her father and uncle in an “honor killing” once she marries the young man she loves. It’d be hard for anyone with a feminist bone or beating heart in them to not get riled up by this story, and it’s told with restraint and intelligence.
Pro: Angry. Con: Angry.
Eight more shorts after the jump
Last Day of Freedom is an animated documentary. You’ve never seen an animated documentary short, you say? There’s a good reason for that. By animating an interview with the loving brother of a troubled Vietnam veteran who beats a woman and leaves her for dead, and then adding additional animation to the details of the story, we're distanced from it. You feel emotionally removed from the piece. It’s basically a long monologue of a very sad true story, and you miss the nuances of this man’s actual face, which is our only conduit to the grief and pain behind the tragedy.
Pro: Original approach. Con: Bad original approach.
Chau, Beyond the Lines follows the eponymous hero, a Vietnamese teenager brutally deformed at birth by Agent Orange. Unable to properly hold tools, his attempt to become an artist is traced with a startling lack of sentimentality and instead with deep feeling. If you don’t feel like an asshole for how lucky you are after having watched this film, you may not be human. Pro: Disabled person gets happy ending.
Con: Truly painful movie to watch.
Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah is as cumbersome as its title. The film is an extended interview with the director of the famous 10-hour Holocaust documentary Shoah. There’s some interesting information on how long it took (twelve years) for Lanzmann to make the film, and Nazi stuff always has that tangy pull, but this is basically something you’d see as an extra on a DVD.
Pro: Subject matter. Con: Dull.
What will win: Probably Body Team 12. It celebrates an everyday worker and leaves you with a very positive feeling considering it’s about a super unfunny disease.
Look out for: Chau, Beyond the Lines, which is by far the category’s most moving film; or A Girl in the River, because it will make every voter furious and want to impose their Western values everywhere in the world.
Live Action Short
Ave Maria is a “comic” (I think the director thinks it’s comic) story about five nuns who begrudgingly help a family who have crashed their car into the Virgin Mary statue outside their convent. The basic narrative elements don’t even make sense (the status is so far off the abandoned road that it makes no sense the crash would even happen), and at one point it switches gears tonally to a Hollywood montage of the nuns fixing the car. It’s terrible. A friend referred to it as “Israeli Sister Act” which actually sounds like a much better film than this one.
Pro: Quirky. Con: Very slight story.
Shok takes place in Kosovo during the wars in the 1990s, Ye Olde Story of two young boys whose friendship is tested. There’s a section of the 21-minute film where the family is taken out of their home that feels astonishingly true and powerful, but it’s a bunch of sentimental hogwash as well, pushed further into cliché by a framing device featuring one of the boys as an adult.
Pro: Time-tested plot. Con: None.
Everything Will Be OK is a German film about a weekend visit between a young girl and her father a few years after the parents’ divorce. It has that patented European approach of long takes and awkward real moments, especially during its final set piece, where it’s all the more heartbreaking because it plays out in real time rather than a souped-up edited version.
Pro: Deeply felt. Con: Too real.
Stutterer, at 11 minutes, is the shortest of these entrants, and the category’s biggest crowd pleaser. Fortunately, this tale of a young British man who suffers from a severe stutter, also contains the category’s most sophisticated filmmaking. Director Benjamin Cleary gives you an astonishing amount of information in very quick moments, giving a full picture of the protagonist’s life in a wonderfully economical manner.
Pro: Funny, light, and touching. Con: Too conventional?
Day One follows a female interpreter on her first day on the job in Afghanistan. The situation she finds herself in is unimaginable, and it’s an involving bit of melodrama. But the lead actress doesn’t seem fully up to the task, and it basically makes you long to just be watching Claire Danes in an episode of Homeland.
Pro: Exciting, involving story. Con: Claire Danes.
Will win: Shok. Oscar voters love sentimental hogwash, and the director has talent: his filmmaking feels assured.
Look out for: Stutterer. It earns its goodwill, and features a winning performance by lead Matthew Needham, who’s like Ben Wishaw’s older bisexual brother. It’d be a deserving win.
Have you seen these pictures? (They play through March 3rd at the IFC Center in NYC.) If so which are you rooting for and who do you think takes the gold?
Reader Comments (5)
I enjoyed Ave Maria while I was watching it (to the credit of the actor) but it really has real depth to it. Almost slapstick. Shok and Day One were too much for me and in all the bad ways. The heaviness was unbearable and made me yearn for them to end. My two favorites are Stutterer which surprisingly touched me the most especially that very final shot. It's incredible what that actor can achieve with his eyes. And the love interest as well. Without any lines, I wanted to know her entire story, and Everything will be ok. There is some genius at play with how the German movie was made. It starts as very ordinary, nothing happens but also kind of unsettling and ends with one of the most powerful father/daughter scene I have ever seen. By the end you're looking back at every moment in the movie with a completely different perspective. I agree Shok will probably win because it's more tidy than Day One. But the more deserving movies are the German and the British movies.
Just saw the Live Action set last night and I'm really rooting for Stutterer. All five films have their qualities but what was able to be conveyed so organically and efficiently in Stutterer really blew me away. Fantastic performance from Needham and I absolutely agree with that Winshaw comment - I thought the same after watching the film. Special shout out to the little girl in Everything Will Be Okay, who would've been a great actress nominee if performances in such films were eligible.
Looking forward to the animated set.
I love "Stutterer". I felt it was the only one of those movies who had a real Auteur Signature.
I'm not keen on DAY ONE all that much, but I'm baffled by the comments about it. It has nothing to do with Homeland except, I guess, its location? The actress seemed quite good, I thought. I'm predicting it for the win, although I wouldn't be surprised by SHOK. My favourite, far and away, is EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY but much like JUST BEFORE LOSING EVERYTHING a couple of years ago, the best film of the bunch (those two have similar plots with near identical structures) will win to something that's a bit easier.
As for doc shorts, I was unfortunately unable to see the three HBO ones, but from what I've heard BODY TEAM 12 seems pretty strong, although I'd like to see SPECTRES OF THE SHOAH win as a nod to the ten-hour Lanzmann film.
Not to make light of a grim subject, but i totally thought that pic attached to the description was some godawful Minion cosplay.