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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Saturday, January 25, 2025

entry arrow10:26 PM | From Courage to Cicatrice

Part 1 of the 2024 Oscar Shorts Considered

Every time Oscar season comes—this usually starts around November and ends around the time the annual Oscar Awards telecast gets held, which is around early March—I would embark on a months-long movie marathon popularly called the Oscars Death Race.

It’s so-called because all participants—usually cinephiles like me who want some structure around our fervent movie-watching—have to catch all the films anticipated to get some Oscar nominations before that particular announcement rolls around mid-January. [A lot of what we watch don’t even receive any nominations, which leads to a round of griping online—“What do you mean Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers did not receive any nomination, but Jacques Audiard’s execrable Emilia Perez got thirteen?” “What? Nicole Kidman did not get nominated for her best role to date in Babygirl?” “I knew Angelina Jolie was a longshot for a nomination for Maria, but I’m still surprised.” “All We Imagine as Light was robbed!”]

When the nominations finally hit, we embark on catching all the remaining films nominated before the telecast itself, in a fervent race to watch them all, and it’s not always easy, especially if you don’t live in the United States. Every year, there are white whales—which are films that are almost impossible to watch, because their release dates are atrocious, or the filmmakers for some reason just choose to hold on to them without viable distribution. For the 2024-2025 season, that has got to be the full-length documentary Porcelain War, and the documentary short Death by Numbers, which, as far as ordinary cinephiles are concerned, do not really exist. [I have since bought a ticket for an online February screening of Porcelain War, which apparently does exist. And when it was still on the short list, Eno was also something I planned to watch online—because I was intrigued by the idea that it utilized a computer program which selects footage and edits the film so that a different version is shown each time it is screened. But its online distributors did not make it easy to buy a ticket. So when it failed to get a nomination last January 23, I just willingly let it go, even if I am a huge fan of the documentaries of Gary Hustwitt.] Then there are The Brutalist, September 5, Nickel Boys, and I’m Still Here, which are out-of-reach for non-U.S. death racers simply because their distributors are, for a lack of a better term, stupid. So sometimes we make do with so-called “cam” copies of these films, pirated via a camcorder in a movie theater, because once you are on a death race track, you have to do everything you can to get to the finish line. Even watch bad copies of them online.

The release of the Oscars shortlists in early December is our Thanksgiving—and helps narrow the list down, because it trims the number of international films, documentary films, and all the shorts [live action, animated, and documentary] to a manageable fifteen each. The Oscar nomination announcement is our Christmas Day, and the Oscar telecast is our New Year—because that day marks the beginning of another film year for most of us. There’s even a website that tracks all the films you have watched, complete with a leaderboard. [As of this writing, I am at #11 worldwide, with 96% of all nominated films already screened by me.]

Why do I do this? Because I’m a masochist. And because I truly love film. And because without this structure, I would not watch titles that are definitely out of my comfort zone.

Having said all that, I have a particular interest in following all the short films in contention. I like short films. The best ones manage to convey with gravity their themes in ten, or twenty, or thirty minutes—sometimes better than feature-length films which are four or five times longer in terms of running time. For film year 2024, out of the shortlists released last December, I managed to see almost all the titles in the live action and documentary shorts categories, and everything in the animated short category.

The five nominated live action short films are Anuja [d. Adam J. Graves], I’m Not a Robot [d. Victoria Warmerdam], The Last Ranger [d. Cindy Lee], A Lien [d. Sam Cutler-Kreutz and David Cutler-Kreutz], and The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent [d. Nebojša Slijepčević]—a great list for the simple reason that it did not include Dovecote, which was the worst film in the short list, a one-shot mess that starred Zoe Saldana as an inmate in a Venice prison for women that seemed to mistake its cinematographic dexterity with depth. It was awful. [Saldana, alas, stars in two of 2024’s most maligned, but strangely Oscar-considered, movies: this one, and Emilia Perez.]

The other unnominated films run the gamut of excellence deprived of recognition to truly awful exercises of the form. I was very surprised that Àlex Lora Cercos’s The Masterpiece did not get a nomination, given that it has a lot of Parasite vibes to it—including the house the story is set in, and the story revolving around a small clash between the privileged and the poor. I like its conceit that it is a clash over a painting, but whether or not which party gets the painting in the end, this does not matter at all, because the painting is a MacGuffin. The subtext of the film is the story: the contrast in material culture between a rich couple and a couple of scraps men; the posture each camp instinctively take towards the other in terms of “safety”; the lackadaisical way the rich have with their excess and “trash,” which the poor, all intentional, feast on as a source for living; and the power dynamics on display when fighting over what “seems” valuable. What intrigued me about the short film is the way the camera lingers on the younger scraps man as he looks with some befuddlement at the older one, who just made the choice that ended the short film. Was the look in anger? Or relief? I think that’s the invitation the film gifts us to consider its thesis. As for me, I think the right choice was made. [It would be difficult to sell that painting, anyway, without a certificate of its provenance.]

I also liked Dani Feixas’ Paris 70, a tender antidote to most grim Alzheimer’s drama out there—and the short film truly earns it with its pace, its characterization, its story—about a son who finds a way to humor his ailing mother by succumbing to her dreams of traveling to other places. I also liked Portia A. Buckley’s Clodagh, about a nun who discovers a talented young dancer in her congregation, and how it limns the borders of integrity, however small. Where do we draw the line at a lie, especially if it benefits us? Are there small lies and big lies?

The other unnominated films in the live action short list felt mid—if mildly involving in some places, but generally falling flat. The surprising thing about TJ O’Grady-Peyton’s Room Taken, about a homeless man who starts living in the house of a blind woman, is that it is not a horror film at all, but bends over backwards to make its disturbing tale a fable of humanism. Mohammed Almughanni’s An Orange from Jaffa, about an Israeli taxi driver who takes in as fare a Palestinian man who has difficulty crossing a checkpoint, does not really do much with its embedded tension. Jean de Meuron’s Edge of Space—which is a period film set at the height of the US-Soviet space race in the 1960s, and follows an ambitious USAF test pilot who is recruited by NASA for a suborbital mission in an X-15 hypersonic rocket-powered aircraft—is strangely cold and uninvolving for a space race story, and the only thing that carries it is the painstaking attention to detail, and to image. The worst of the lot, aside from Marco Perego Saldana’s Dovecote, is Pavel Sýkora and Viktor Horák’s The Compatriot, an ill-conceived drama about a widower at the height of the Nazi occupation of the former Czechoslovakia, who gets an unannounced visit by an SS officer—with the only thing the two having in common being their Sudeten origins. It felt very much like a typical Oscar bait story—except that this time around, the Academy did not bite. There’s also Jens Kevin Georg’s Crust, a very loose adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which follows a boy trying to prove his mettle by getting his first scar—something that everyone in his strange family seems to value above all else. Its telling is so offbeat though that I was more repulsed than entertained, and it was actually a relief when it was over. I have not seen Robert Moniot’s The Ice Cream Man, but the reviews online have not been kind—which might be why its filmmakers have chosen not to release the film in a suitable manner.

Of the nominated live action shorts, I did not expect Lee’s The Last Ranger to get the nod—although its depiction of a true story involving the fight against animal poachers in Africa might have swayed liberal-leaning Academy members with its important environmental message. [Sometimes, it’s really about the synopsis.] The story follows a young girl who is introduced to the responsibilities [and even wonder] of a game reserve by the last remaining ranger in their community—but soon the two are ambushed by poachers intent on harming the rhinos in the ranger’s keeping for their horns. During the fateful encounter, the young girl also discovers a terrible secret—a twist I knew was coming from the moment the film began. It’s not a bad film—it just feels like an important story told in a mediocre way.

I appreciated Graves’ Anuja because it felt like a part and parcel of 2024’s cinematic trend of following the travails of Indian women [a list that would include Santosh, All We Imagine as Light, and Laapataa Ladies—all of them unique and involving highlights of Indian cinema last year], but compared to these films, this short one felt like a breath of fresh air, simply because of its optimism. The story centers on two plucky sisters working in a garment factory and living on their own, but both soon face a decision they have to make at film’s end, which would alter their very lives. I make it sound ominous, but it isn’t. It is a film cloaked in hope—and springing from a story that has groundings in truth—and this quality makes it an endearing watch. It doesn’t have much of a punch, truth to tell, and it might even be forgettable, but its heart is in the right place.

Warmerdam’s I’m Not a Robot, on the other hand, is a serio-comic story about a woman who, while listening to music on her computer, discovers the program rebooting. This forces her to accomplish a series of CAPTCHA tests—which, to her chagrin, she fails again and again and again, leading her to entertain the disturbing notion that she might actually be a robot. The short film starts off as a commentary on our increasingly AI-infected lives, but it takes a sharp turn and becomes a rumination on relationships and the things we do to find compatibility in others—a turn that’s not exactly well-handled, but it’s entertaining enough, and the film is a hoot from beginning to end.

Cutler-Kreutz’s A Lien is the film from among the lot that feels like very much like it has been grabbed from the most contemporary headlines. It follows a bi-racial couple and their child as they arrive on the day of their green card interview, but they are soon confronted with a dangerous immigration process that’s actually quite common among agents working for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [or ICE]—the taking into immediate custody, and then deportation, of “illegal aliens” who are, in fact, in the very process of legalizing their stay under the very blessings of immigration authorities. It is slice-of-life story whose tension comes from the unfairness of the situation we behold, and the film’s effectivity comes from the deft handling of that tension.

But the one live action short film that moved and disturbed me the most was Slijepčević’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, because its story is one that needed to be told, and because its narrative conceit indicts its viewers about the possibilities of courageous action when confronted with evil. We are told that the story is inspired by the actions of an actual hero from the Bosnian Wars in the early 1990s—that of Tomo Buzov, a passenger on a Belgrade-Bar train, which was stopped in the village of Štrpci in 1993 by the Serbian White Eagles paramilitary group. The paramilitary unit, under the command of Milan Lukić, subsequently pulled away 18 Bosniak Muslims and one Croat from among the passengers, who were then eventually massacred. Buzov was the sole non-Bosniak passenger on the train who tried to stand up against the attackers—and was also taken away to be massacred with the rest. I cannot explain the conceit of the film without taking away its power, but it is very much an experiment in point-of-view, which also asks us a question: you might think you will take a courageous stand in the face of evil—but will you really? As one Letterbxd member puts it, the film is about “the fragile balance of who we want to be and who we [really] are.”



Here is my ranking of all the live action short films, including the unnominated titles:

[1] The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent
[2] A Lien
[3] I’m Not a Robot
[4] The Masterpiece
[5] Paris 70
[6] Clodagh
[7] Anuja
[8] Room Taken
[9] The Last Ranger
[10] An Orange from Jaffa
[11] Edge of Space
[12] Crust
[13] The Compatriot
[14] Dovecote
[15] The Ice Cream Man

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