Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
1:40 PM |
From French Kissers to Small People Adrift
Part 3 of the 2024 Oscar Shorts Considered
It is quite telling that of the fifteen animated short films that were shortlisted for the Oscars last December, the five that eventually made the cut and the nomination—Beautiful Men, In the Shadow of the Cypress, Magic Candies, Wander to Wonder, and Yuck!—only one was in my Top 5. Not that I didn’t like the rest of them. In fact, they are all quite good, and the nominations are totally deserved. I just liked other shortlisted titles better. That is how amazing the animation field—including both the shorts and the features—has been in the past year. As I’ve noted earlier, walang patapon.
I can see why Nicolas Keppens’ Beautiful Men made the cut. It is a beautiful dour, sarcastically funny story about three balding brothers who travel to Istanbul to get a hair transplant, and stuck with each other in a hotel far from home, their insecurities grow faster than their hair. There is always something of this kind of atmosphere in an animated short that makes it a must on the finalist round—as if the animation branch of the Academy feels the need to check themselves and say, “Hey, cartoons are not just for kids.”
But given that, what to make Jean-Sébastien Hamel and Alexandra Myotte’s A Crab in the Pool, which didn’t make the cut? It is a zany and psychedelic French look at puberty and the crushing insecurities and hormonal urges of adolescence, with an equally crushing subterfuge of death and loss, and I fell in love with this short film as soon as I finished it and realized its import: how—in its story of young siblings (an older sister and a younger brother)—we often turn to imagination to make sense of the tiny earthquakes in our lives. And what to make of Torill Kove’s Maybe Elephants, which also didn’t make the cut? It is the story of a globe-trotting family—courtesy of the mother who gets the occasional urge to leave and uproot their lives—and who finally find themselves in Nairobi where their three teenage daughters finally rebel to seek some antidote to restlessness, even as they themselves, as adolescents, find their inner lives turned upside down. It is a mature story about restlessness and roots—with an ending that approximates a kind of peace everyone is looking for.
I can see why Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani’s In the Shadow of the Cypress got the nod. This Iranian short film is about a former captain who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and has chosen to live, with his young daughter, in a humble house by the sea. They live an isolated life together, daily confronting the harsh challenges that come their way—but a gulf remains between them, until an unforeseen event (a whale beaching ashore) somehow changes the course of their lives. The animation of this film is dreamy in its simplicity, and the environmental and psychological story tugs at you because it is rendered so well emotionally.
But what of Tod Polson’s The 21, which didn’t get nominated? Like the war-tinged tale of Cypress, this one is the true story of the twenty-one Coptic men who were martyred by ISIS in Libya in 2015. The animation—produce in the style of Coptic iconography—is beautiful, in perfect contrast to its subject matter, which is horrifying. In the beginning, this short reminded me of the [odious] Chick Tracts I used to read and devour as an evangelical child, which often used the stories of the suffering of Christians in foreign cultures as missionary propaganda—but I also needed to check myself: This story is nevertheless true, and the victims were Coptic Christians under the tyranny of terrorists. In the end I needed to disregard religion and just focus on the basic inhumanity of this story: killing people just because they have a different faith than you is the ultimate inhumanity so far from any divine promise. That goes to adherents of all faiths. And what to make of Iain Gardner’s A Bear Named Wojtek, which also didn’t get nominated? It is another true story about another war—World War II to be exact—about a displaced and orphaned bear who finds itself in the company of a troop of Polish soldiers, forms an inseparable bond with them, and finds itself an unlikely war hero. Unlike 21, this one ends happily—but both remind us about the horrors of war, and the inhumanity it can breed.
I can see why Loïc Espuche’s Yuck! made it to the finals. Adult subject matters may intrude once in a while in the animated short film category, but a cartoon that’s clearly for kids [and the adults who delight in their kiddie charms] will still be a shoo-in for a nomination. This one is a humorous take on kids finding kissing on the mouth—done by gross adults—totally gross. [Kissing in the film is highlighted by the kissers’ lips turning bright and incandescent purple.] It centers on Léo, who laughs at these kissers together with his gross-out friends at a summer camp—but he has a secret he won’t tell his friends: his own mouth has actually begun glistening, and he wants to kiss a friend, who also wants to kiss him back. The humor in this child-centered tale is the magic formula for nomination.
Which might explain why Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi’s Bottle George also didn’t make it. It makes a case for alcoholism and domestic abuse, and it does so by exploring the relationship between George, a man trapped inside a small bottle, and Chako, a young, poor, resilient girl who is scared of her alcoholic father. It has a child at its center—but the subject matter is too dark to be embraced. There is humor too in Goodbye My World [directed by Florian Maurice, Astrid Novais, Estelle Bonnardel, Baptiste Duchamps, Quentin Devred, and Maxime Foltzer]—but it’s about a man dressed in a fish costume, who suddenly finds the world coming to an end—and then he spends the last moments of the world on a wild scooter ride across downtown, crossing the chaos to reach a mysterious tower—to reach his [spoiler]. It’s all warmhearted, but the darkness of the apocalypse might be too much to warrant a nomination.
I can see why Daisuke Nishio’s Magic Candies got nominated. This Japanese short film is a delight! The story follows a boy named Dong-Dong, who never gets invited by the other kids to play—but he does not mind, since he’s fine just playing marbles on his own. Then one day, he buys a bag of colorful candies, which, when eaten, gives him an uncanny ability to see fantastical renderings of things and concepts. It was an enjoyable romp—although it made me think: is this kind of like a pro-drugs allegory? But I might be over-reading.
But what of Don Hertzfeldt’s Me, which is equally surreal as Magic Candies? Hertzfeld has always been one of my favorite animators. His World of Tomorrow and It’s Such a Beautiful Day are both must-sees if you care for animation that is substantive as much as they are fun. In his new film, he creates a more opaque, if tantalizingly non-linear, tale, which he calls “a musical odyssey about trauma and the retreat of humanity into itself.” The film, in its occasional foray into abstraction, is less accessible than his older ones, which might be why he got left off the final list—even if Hertzfeld is a former nominee. Sometimes abstraction can be a hindrance to appreciating a short animated film’s gifts. This is the case of Kei Kanamori’s Origami, which also didn’t get the nomination. Alas, the delightful film can be reduced into being just a playful and abstract romp through the art of paper-folding—even if the animation is topnotch and truly engaging. [But then again, PES got an Oscar nomination in 2012 for Fresh Guacamole, a two-minute abstract Claymation romp about the making of guacamole—not from avocado, but from everyday things found around the house.] Abstraction hindrance is certainly the case for why Anna Samo’s The Wild-Tempered Clavier, my least favorite title of the lot, did not make the cut. The film approaches abstraction in its use of toilet paper as film material, with whatever story there is being painted onto the sheets while the toilet paper is unrolled, like you would a film—all the while using the immortal music of Bach as background. I had no patience for the exercise.
Laura Gonçalves and Alexandra Ramires’ Percebes is an anomaly among all the shortlisted, unnominated titles, because neither is it abstract nor nonlinear. The Portuguese film uses the sea and urban Algarve as backdrop, and in it we follow the complete life cycle of a special shellfish called percebes—the goose barnacle. The animation, while interesting, is a bit off-putting, and the whole film comes off as a dry attempt at a National Geographic documentary. I immediately forgot what it was all about the moment I finished watching it. I understand why it didn’t get the nomination.
This leaves Nina Gantz’s Wander to Wonder, the only film in my Top 5 that also got a nomination. It deserves it, because of its conceit, its style, its humor, and its darkness. A captivating stop-motion animated short that masterfully blends nostalgia with dark humor, it centers on three miniature humanlike characters—Mary, Billybud, and Fumbleton—who once starred in a 1980s children’s television program. Following the sudden death of their creator and host, Uncle Gilly, the trio is left isolated in the studio, striving to continue their show amidst growing despair and dwindling resources. Gantz’s direction skillfully juxtaposes the innocent charm of vintage children’s programming with an unsettling atmosphere, creating a unique viewing experience. The meticulous animation pays homage to the era’s aesthetics, while the narrative delves into themes of grief, isolation, and the struggle to find purpose after loss. The characters' attempts to maintain normalcy—such as reading fan letters and producing episodes—are both poignant and darkly comedic.
Wander to Wonder has garnered critical acclaim, winning awards at festivals like Anima Brussels and receiving nominations for prestigious honors, including the BAFTA. Its inventive storytelling and distinctive visual style make it a standout piece in contemporary animation, offering a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection between childhood innocence and the complexities of adult realities. I hope it wins the Oscar for Best Animated Short.
Here is my ranking of all the animated short films, including the unnominated titles:
[1] A Crab in the Pool
[2] Maybe Elephants
[3] Wander to Wonder
[4] The 21
[5] Me
[6]Yuck!
[7] Origami
[8] Magic Candies
[9] Bottle George
[10] Goodbye My World
[11] A Bear Named Wojtek
[12] Beautiful Men
[13] In the Shadow of the Cypress
[14] Percebes
[15] The Wild-Tempered Clavier
The allure of the documentary short is its journalistic fervor demonstrated in brevity. I’ve always preferred nonfiction as a genre to enjoy—these days, the books I read are mostly nonfiction titles [I am drawn towards subjects involving history and the arts, and sometimes biographies], and the films I gravitate to the most are documentaries. And so, when a nonfiction film does its job in a short running time, I consider that a huge win: I learn of true things with societal import, and I did it without whiling away precious time I do not really have given a busy life.
This is why I keep track of documentary short subject films considered annually by the Academy Awards—especially through the short list it puts out in December of every year, which culls into fifteen titles from a list of possible hundreds. This is helpful because one cannot really track and see all the documentary shorts that get produced every year. Who has the time? Fifteen is manageable. I am aware that there are many superior documentary shorts that may be overlooked every year—which is unfortunate, but that is how the system works, and again, fifteen titles are manageable.
For this year, the Oscars nominated the following documentary shorts: Incident [d. Bill Morrison], I Am Ready, Warden [d. Smriti Mundhra], The Only Girl in the Orchestra [d. Molly O’Brien], Death by Numbers [d. Kim A. Snyder], and Instruments of a Beating Heart [d. Ema Ryan Yamazaki].
I have seen all the shortlisted documentary shorts, except for two. Of all the nominated titles, I have yet to see Death by Numbers, which has earned a reputation of late as being a “white whale.” It is about the aftermath of the school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, and follows the advocacy of one survivor. The film has been rated highly, with one Letterbxd reviewer commenting: “I appreciate the focus on the micro rather than the macro. This isn't an overview or statement on school shootings, but a look at how one person is impacted immediately and going forward.” This sounds like an endorsement, so I will probably like this film.
Among the unnominated films in the short list, I have yet to see Once Upon a Time in Ukraine by Betsy West, a filmmaker whose past documentaries [often in tandem with Julia Cohen] I have enjoyed immensely, including RBG [a 2019 film about the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg which was nominated for Best Documentary in its year] and Julia [a 2021 about Julia Childs]. Would I have enjoyed Once Upon a Time in Ukraine if I had seen it? Most probably, given the director—although I am naturally wary [or perhaps weary?] of war documentaries.
There are three films which I found quite surprising for missing the nomination, simply because they are so powerfully made, with subjects I would have thought would resonate the most with regular Oscar voters. Then again, they also did not nominate Rashida Jones and Will McCormack’s A Swim Lesson, given that one of its directors is a popular actress and the daughter of Quincy Jones, and that its conceit is closely tailored after My Octopus Teacher, a 2020 documentary short which won its category in its Oscar year—but instead of an octopus, the helpful purveyor of life lessons is a Beverly Hills swimming teacher. [I rather prefer the aquatic animal.]
But Hannah Rafkin’s Keeper is a beautiful, essential, emphatic, and restrained work, about a United Nations staffer in New York who moonlights as an urban beekeeper, and who perseveres in his calling despite a bee allergy and a bout of cancer. [It is also a story of the beekeeper’s daughter, a brilliant young woman who deftly balances college life with beekeeping and taking care of her ailing father.] It always pains me to see that bad things [i.e., cancer] can happen to good people, but otherwise it is a hopeful story about a beautiful family, and what they do—beekeeping in a big city—is awesome. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
Chasing Roo by Skye Fitzgerald [who has been nominated in this category before, with the powerful Hunger Ward], is also another must-watch. It is a deftly handled piece—about wildlife rescue experts in Australia devoting their lives to saving kangaroos, in tension with professional hunters seeking to harvest them for meat—and the film surprises for its balance between tenderness and visceral carnage, and also surprises for its observant humanity. Its score and sound design are also vital aesthetic choices. It doesn’t shy away from showing us the non-tender parts [those dogs attacking that hog and the various scenes of hunting and killing kangaroos will have animal rights activists up in arms], which could be graphic, but I think they are necessary to prove the film’s point. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
Nadia Gill and Dominic Gill’s Planetwalker is a poignant portrait of John Francis, who is popularly known with the titular moniker. In 1971, he witnessed an oil tanker collision in the San Francisco Bay, and the sight of dead birds on the shoreline, harmed by the oil spill, caused him to give up motorized transport and began walking everywhere. He took another radical move, and vowed not to speak, convinced that listening rather than talking adding fuel to the fire of any issue. This did not stop him from earning graduate credentials, and even becoming a college professor. He didn’t talk and he didn’t use motorized vehicles, but he taught using the simplest hand signals and walked everywhere, even to various parts of the globe which would invite him to “talk” about his environmental advocacy. It is a stirring portrait of a committed man and a gentle soul. It is, however, not nominated for the Oscars this year. Watch it anyway.
The rest of the unnominated films are powerful in their own right, but are flawed in many ways—but that does not stop some films from achieving greatness. I’m not sure these are great, but they are fascinating portraits. Kimberly Reed’s Seat 31 follows Zooey Zephyr, who was expelled from the House of Representatives in Montana for rebuking its members on a prospective bill banning transgender medical care. She later made a nearby bench her “office.” The film follows her struggles, and her triumphs, but is most powerful when it showcases the hate she confronts from the most ordinary of people—like a tribe of housewives taking over her bench, just to piss her off. The film feels necessary, and while it did resonate, I found its subject matter a little too performative for comfort. But I guess you have to be that to be in politics and wanting change. I understand why it was nominated.
Jenifer McShane’s The Quilters—about a group of inmates who turn to quilt-making as a form of rehabilitation—makes for good double screening with Greg Kwedar’s Sing Sing [2024], which is also about art-pursuing inmates, this time revolving around theatre, and has produced an Oscar hopeful in Colman Domingo, who is now nominated for Best Actor for the movie. I like how observant The Quilters was, and how appropriately paced. It feels plain, however, and ultimately does not rise to memorable. I understand why it was not nominated.
Julio Palacio’s Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World is about a teenage girl with non-verbal autism, whom the film depicts as someone who “unlocks a joyous world of self-expression as she shares her voice for the first time using a letter board.” That assertion, however—about the effectivity of letter boards as communication medium for those with autism—has proven controversial. And the film did not really move me. I understand why it was not nominated.
Jacqueline Baylon’s Until He’s Back is about a Moroccan father who has learned that his son has died in an attempt to get to Spain as a refugee. He embarks on the difficult task to bring his son’s remains back home—and faces a complicated process of repatriation. The film is important—but to be honest, as soon as I finished watching it, I forgot all about it, which meant it had no resonance. I understand why it was not nominated.
Ömer Sami’s Eternal Father is a strange one. It is about a father and his family—all migrants in Denmark—who have to contend with the fact that the patriarch is intent on defying death, through cryonics. It is interesting when it gets into the family dynamics, but the film lacks any real depth about cryonics itself—Is it a science or a pseudoscience? Is it an inherently capitalist scam that banks on our fear of death and illness? Why is this family giving this man a pass with this hairbrained scheme to live forever? We don’t really get any answers. I understand why it was not nominated.
Of the nominated films, the one that I enjoyed very much without liking its subject at all was Yamazaki’s Instruments of a Beating Heart. It is a simple film about a very young girl in an elementary school in Japan, who is single-minded in her quest to be part of an orchestra who has just been tasked to provide a musical number welcoming new students to the school. Reading through some of the comments about the film, I was astounded by quite a number who voiced such tender concern for the protagonist, Ayame. They cared when she cried. They cared when she bungled her audition to play an instrument. They cared when she was given a bit of a dressing down by her music teacher. And I was like—what is everybody talking about? That girl needed to be taken down a notch, because she is going to grow up like a Japanese versionof Tracy Flick. She is an annoying and assuming kid who does not do well at her tasks, and cries all throughout the film because she doesn’t get what she wants. Then when she gets another chance, and still does badly, she is always late and never practices, and then when gets reprimanded, she cries crocodile tears. As far as I’m concerned that music teacher said what needed to be said. [And the boy Haruka also totally deserved that spot, and I’m with Ide all the way.] I understand why the film is nominated.
I loved Bill Morrison’s Incident—although “loved” might be the wrong word that describes my respect for this short documentary. It is a feat of assemblage, piecing together all sorts of surveillance footage around the incident of a black man shot to death by police. What you see ultimately convinces you about how rigged the system is with regards racial profiling, and the easy escape of denial policemen resort to when they bow to their murderous instincts. I understand why the film is nominated.
I also loved Molly O’Brien’s The Only Girl in the Orchestra, because it is a profile about a talented musician who is playfully wary about being profiled—but is game enough to let the cameras get a peek into her storied life anyway. The thing is, double bassist Orin O’Brien deserves this attention because her life as a member of New York Philarmonic has been truly trailblazing. She was hired by Leonard Bernstein in 1966 as the first female musician in the orchestra, and became the focus of much media interest and fascination because of that. She is now retired, and in her late 80s—but insists no fuss should be made about her, preferring instead to put a spotlight on her family, her students, her friends, and her colleagues. Which makes her doubly worthy of a documentary. I understand why the film is nominated.
Then there is Smriti Mundhra’s I Am Ready, Warden, which follows the last days in a Texas death row for inmate John Henry Ramirez, who robbed a convenience store when he was a young man, and killing its attendant in the process by riddling him with bullets. He soon fled to Mexico, stayed there for many years, but was eventually arrested and sent back to the U.S. to face prosecution, eventually landing him with capital punishment. But the real story is about his “rehabilitation,” and how he would soon seek out forgiveness from the son of the man he killed, and also demonstrably mending his life by becoming a “Christian.” That turn towards the evangelical in the middle was what left me in a lurch, because it left such a bad taste in the mouth—making the entire thing sound like Evangelical Christian propaganda. What a scam. This is probably the worst film in the whole Oscars shortlist for documentary shorts. I don’t understand why the film is nominated.
Here is my ranking of all the documentary short films, including the unnominated titles:
[1] Keeper
[2] Incident
[3] Chasing Roo
[4] The Only Girl in the Orchestra
[5] Planetwalker
[6] Instruments of a Beating Heart
[7] Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr
[8] Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World
[9] The Quilters
[10] Eternal Father
[11] Until He’s Back
[12] A Swim Lesson
[13] I Am Ready, Warden
Unseen by me:
[14] Death by Numbers
[15] Once Upon a Time in Ukraine
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
Currently watching a documentary on Charles and Ray Eames — artists and designers after my own heart. They believed that all art connects, and in their case, architecture and design, film and photography, and painting in particular. I love that they were mavericks. I love that they started their career with a failure [i.e., the famous Eames chair was notorious for starting out to be a literal award-winning failure of a chair — they could not find a way to manufacture it, until they actually did]. I love that they did film. My favorites are still Powers of Ten [1977] and Day of the Dead [1957] and Symmetry [1961], because these short films are so beyond what you would expect Eames to do.
This short film, “Raise Your Arches,” which Edgar Wright directed for McDonald’s is brilliant. The simplicity of the story, sans burger or store. The meme-able eyebrow-raising. The iconic score from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
3:00 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Subject, 2019
With Bong Jon-hoo's Parasite and Seung-jun Yi's In the Absence, we truly see a Korean ascendance in world cinema -- and both have so much alike, to be honest, including their unsparing critique of contemporary Korean society. In this documentary short, we navigate through that via the ineptness that attended the botched rescue of the ferry MV Sewol, which sank off the coast of South Korea in 2014, killing hundreds of passengers, mostly high school students in a field trip. It's a gripping and unsettling fly-on-the-wall documentary, and we are made to witness the hours tick by as the ship sinks slowly, while its passengers patiently await rescue, to their deaths.
I don't want to say much about Kristine Samuelson and John Haptas' Life Overtakes Me, except that in this documentary, about refugee kids in Sweden falling into a form of sleeping sickness bordering on coma triggered by PTSD over their plight, something feels and smells fishy.
Perhaps the most feeling-precious of this year's bunch of documentary short subject nominees is Laura Nix's Walk Run Cha-Cha, a love story about Vietnamese refugees re-bonding over ballroom dancing in New York in their senior years. You see, they used to be lovers in Vietnam, but were soon separated by the vagaries of war. Meeting once more in America, they try to rekindle their romance by dancing. Awwww. It's cute, but it's shallow -- and not even the sentimental production number at the end can truly save this film.
Carol Dysinger's Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) is your standard "people in perilous places" documentary, and while its narrative arc and subject matter -- about a school that pains to teach Afghan girls basic school subjects, plus skateboarding -- no longer surprise us, it doesn't disappoint in putting heart to the heroism it depicts.
In Sami Khan and Smriti Mundhra's St. Louis Superman, we see a strange hybrid of black lives, politics, and rapping. It mostly works, and I like it, but this film was not made for me.
VERDICT: In order of preference, Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) > In the Absence > St. Louis Superman > Walk Run Cha-Cha > Life Overtakes Me
3:00 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Live-Action Short Films, 2019
Truth to tell, Marshall Curry's The Neighbors’ Window feels so much like a nincompoop's idea of a good short film, I cannot actually believe it survived the culling of the Oscar long list at the expense of other contenders like Rémi Allier's gripping Little Hands. It's a morality tale about a couple who regularly spies on their neighbors across the courtyard they share in their adjacent apartment buildings -- and have come to believe these people lived better lives than they do. Of course it becomes a "the grass is greener..." story, which as an insight feels a little too on-the-nose and obvious. [Didn't Blake Edwards cover this already in 10 in 1979, and better?]
Meryam Joobeu's Brotherhood is deftly told, socially conscious, and remains gripping from beginning to end, easily making this the best of the lot. It's about a Tunisian farming family who has to contend with the sudden appearance of a prodigal son, newly-returned from fighting for ISIS in Syria, and a new wife in tow clad in a burqa. The father does not trust the son's intentions, and is fearful for the possible influence he might have on his younger brothers -- which is the key to the ultimate tragedy in the film.
I do not get the humor, and the praise it has been getting in, of Yves Pia's Nefta Football Club. I can accept it as dark comedy, but it overreaches with its quirkiness and resolution that nothing remains believable at all about this story. It has cross-borders drug smuggling, Adele's "Someone Like You," mules, and soccer all intertwined in its conceit, and never quite pulls off everything. I eye-rolled all throughout this film
We are made to feel that what Bryan Buckley tries to do in Saria is "important." And it is: the film largely dramatizes a real-life Guatemalan tragedy -- about orphaned girls trapped in an institution that is supposed to take care of them, only to be regularly abused, and eventually losing their lives in a fire. All good, and the young actors are committed enough to make this film works. I couldn't help but feel though: is this Bryan Buckley's story to tell?
The set-up of Delphine Girard's Une Sœur (A Sister) is simple: we have a young woman in a car, driven by a man we assume she knows, and then she makes an ordirnary call, ostensibly to her sister -- and then the film flips on us: she is not calling her sister, she is in fact secretly calling the French version of 911, and asking for help. The tension occurs when the operator slowly realizes the call is coded, and she must do all she can to send help to the woman and rescue her. We don't know exactly the nature of passenger's relations with the man, and what has happened to them that led to this -- but we are on her side all the way, until the end when the film flips us one more time and unsettles us once more.
VERDICT: In order of preference, Brotherhood > Une Sœur [A Sister] > Saria > Nefta Football Club > The Neighbors' Window
3:00 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Animated Short Films, 2019
In Daria Kashcheeva's contemplative Dcera [Daughter], the titular character watches over her father who has been taken ill, and slowly her mind wanders through scattered memories of life with him which are not always bright and sunny, painting her father as someone who was not always there for her. But the short film's more than this; it's poetic and complex, and does not give easy answers -- which makes this the best of the lot among the nominees.
We meet a painter and his wife in Bruno Collet's wonderfully affecting Mémorable. He is slowly suffering through the effects of dementia, and she struggles to keep up with the challenges that come with her husband's condition. That we see his struggle rendered in painterly, impressionistic mode makes this tale transcend its grounding sadness.
Song Siqi's Sister is told in stark greyscale that reminds you immediately it is in the territory of retrieved memory, and it is: it is a man's recollection of growing up in a Korean home, with a younger sister who was born to exasperate him. Except that the sister takes on a surreal existence, and the film backtracks with its revelation in Joker-mode, which is frankly disappointing.
In Rosana Sullivan's Kitbull, a cantankerous kitten finds a home in a junky backyard, only to realize she is sharing it with a downtrodden bulldog. Enemies soon turn friends, giving us a film that finds comfort in its utter mediocrity.
In Matthew A. Cherry and Everett Downing Jr.'s Hair Love, a very young African-American girl tries to deal with the everyday challenge of her natural hair, and enlists her clueless father in the task. Hijinks ensues -- but it's so blandly told, it's quite forgettable. And then there's that twist of an ending that's so on the nose with its sentimentality, it's pretty much eye-rolling.
VERDICT: In order of preference, Dcera (Daughter) > Memorable > Sister > Kitbull > Hair Love
10:57 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films
Let's do the Live Action Shorts nominees for the Oscars, shall we? It is mostly a bunch of child-in-danger stories of varying effectivity, but the similarities in the themes will have you thinking, "What is up with Oscars and this deadly regard for children this year?"
I loved Gustav Möller's The Guilty from last year, a fine presentation of how you can create fantastic, tense-filled drama within the confines of a single room, with the gravest action taking place off-camera, registering to us only through the voices of people over the phone. Rodrigo Sorogoyen's Oscar-nominated live action short film Madre (2017) carries the same premise. This time we follow a divorced mother arguing with her own mother about the vagaries of life, only to be interrupted by a fraught call from overseas. The caller is her young boy, ostensibly on vacation with her ex-husband somewhere in France. And then the panic comes: the boy is lost somewhere on an unknown beach, abandoned by the father. Where can he go? Can he trust anyone? It's a child-in-peril conceit that never really registers, because the set-up feels rushed, and the dangers feels abstract, for some reason. It's a question of execution, and this film fails in that regard.
The most tense of all the live action shorts up for the Oscars this year has got to be Jeremy Comte's Fauve (2018), a harrowing story of two Quebec boys in one of the most toxic of all masculine shenanigans -- a pissing contest, which soon goes awry as they go about a small country town finding ways to dare each other in the worst ways possible. They soon meet their reckoning in a surface mine, and the less said about what happens there, the better. It is effective, sad, anxiety-ridden.
Guy Nattiv's Oscar-nominated live action short Skin (2018) is both repellent and riveting at once: its twists and turns are totally unexpected and makes for an exciting story, but in its choice of focus on a racist family -- which humanisizes them to some extent -- it can be both a bit too much to swallow. A skinhead father dotes on his young son, but an encounter with a black man in a grocery store turns deadly, with the boy as witness to the brutality. What happens next is a turn so unexpected that it borders on the sweetest revenge fantasy. What happens in the end is even more shocking -- but thoroughly earned. I liked its storytelling, but it does leave me very disturbed.
Vincent Lambe's Oscar-nominated live action short Detainment (2018) is a dramatisation of the horrific murder of three-year-old James Bulger in Ireland, based on taped interrogations of the two young killers behind it. By its subject alone it is controversial, and while I admired the filmmaker's insistence on exploring this tragedy as a learning lesson for all -- helped for the most part by wrenching portrayals by the young actors -- it is the humanisation of evil that keeps me at bay. It is a film meant to be seen once, but I doubt it is immediately forgettable.
Marianne Farley's Marguerite (2017) stands out because it is the only one in this batch of Oscar-nominated live action shorts that strays far away from depicting children in peril. Instead, it sets its intimate focus on an elderly woman in Quebec who feels a bond with the young female therapist who takes care of her. When she finds out her caregiver has a girlfriend, it triggers a memory of an old forbidden love with all its requisite longing and regret. To be touched by the love of a woman is the only thing in what remains of her life that she has yet to fully realise. In that quiet longing, the film shines -- the only ray of light in this bunch of dark, dark themes.
VERDICT: In order of preference, Fauve > Marguerite > Skin > Madre > Detainment
1:42 AM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Documentary Short Subject Films
Let's do the Documentary Short Subject nominees for the Oscars, shall we?
Marshall Curry's Oscar-nominated documentary short A Night at the Garden (2018) is a Trump rally held in 1939, when the Madison Square Garden in New York played host to 20,000 Americans who were demonstrating their Nazi ideals. This was only a year before the U.S. entered World War II. Observe the similarities. It's chilling. It's archival documentary that speaks so much of the present that its very simplicity is its power.
I don't like watching end-of-life-at-the-hospital drama, but Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Oscar-nominated documentary short End Game (2018) manages to not just shed light on the plight and pluck of people suffering from terminal illness in a hospice... But it does this with keen, gentle, observant eyes, totally interested in all high and lows of palliative care. But I have always adored the work of Epstein and Friedman, who have mostly charted the queerness of popular culture. Here, Epstein and Friedman explore a topic almost tangential to their ouevre, but they do it so well, and so full-heartedly, you can't look away.
Ed Perkins' Oscar-nominated documentary short Black Sheep (2018) is compelling enough in its story about a black kid in 90s London trying to escape racism by whitening his skin and donning blue contact lenses in order to become "friends" with his racist neighbors.
Skye Fitzgerald's Oscar-nominated documentary short Lifeboat (2018) should be memorable, but it's not. It is a chronicle of efforts by activists to save refugees from the treacherous waters and the rickety boats they have set their hopes for better lives on... The subject matter should be compelling enough to follow -- but nothing sticks in this cinematic effort to give face to this very current humanitarian struggle. I couldn't remember a single frame a day after I watched this short film.
It took a long time for Netflix to release on its platform the Oscar-nominated documentary short Period. End of Sentence (2018), Rayka Zehtabchi's attempt to follow a charitable effort to provide cheap sanitary napkins to poor girls in India who needed them most. It has particular importance in a society where the mention of "menstruation" is still a perplexing taboo. It's really a feminist call to arms, using an unlikely object as lens. But the wait proved disappointing, because the film does not live up to expectations as pathbreaking social documentary. Its message feels forced. This film, noteworthy its subject matter may be, has no nuance, has no discernible difference from mere NGO pitch presentation. Also, there's a whiff of Orientalism here I can't quite shake.
VERDICT: In order of preference, End Game > A Night in the Garden > Black Sheep > Period. End of Sentence > Lifeboat.
Can the Oscars scrap one of the last three and replace it with Charlie Tyrell's brilliant My Dead Dad's Porno Tapes (2018)? Why is the Academy so standoffish when it comes to finely etched domestic explorations like this and Sarah Polley's Stories We Tell (2012)?
12:59 PM |
Short Takes on the Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts
Bobby Pontillas and Andrew Chesworth's One Small Step (2018) is basically the prologue of Up + the prologue of Contact + the epilogue of Cinema Paradiso repurposed to become a tale of a girl who dreams of becoming an astronaut.
Psychotherapy becomes animal business in Alison Snowden and David Fine's Animal Behaviour (2018), a good enough effort that metaphorizes through animal stereotypes our quirks and neuroses. Doesn't offer anything else, but funny in places.
How do you animate dementia in old age? Louise Bagnall's Late Afternoon (2017) tries, and comes up with a stream-of-consciousness style of animation that feels just right. And yet it is also strangely detached even if it strives to make us cry.
In Domee Shi's Bao (2018), we get a strange mix of culinary and empty-nest drama. It's cute in many places, but also sometimes creepy in its narrative choices. [She eats her "son"!] Props for occasional Pixar weirdness.
Trevor Jimenez's Weekends (2018) is so painterly it sometimes distracts from its story of a boy shuffling in-between the houses of divorcing parents. Gorgeous and sad, at the same time.
VERDICT: In order of preference, Weekends > One Small Step > Bao > Animal Behaviour > Late Afternoon.
There are hundreds of short films that have explored gay lives. A lot of them have been compiled into anthologies like the Boys Life series. But here's one that has recently come to my attention that I particularly like. This one's a tale of being different -- and growing up. It's titled Golden, and is produced and directed by Kai Stänicke, a German filmmaker. It made the rounds of LGBT film festivals last year. He has uploaded the film to YouTube in response to the Orlando massacre.
It's quite short, but it's disarming. You'll need hankies. Enjoy.
1:40 PM |
From French Kissers to Small People Adrift
