From social justice themes to stories about grief and reckoning with the past, this year’s nominated shorts get serious.
This year, the Oscar-nominated short films are being presented in three programs: live action, animation and documentary. Each program is reviewed below by a separate critic.
Live Action
Short films have always been reliable vehicles for hit-and-run comedy, but you won’t find much to laugh about in the live action section of this year’s Oscar-nominated crop. Incarceration, police brutality, immigration — it’s a sociopolitical smorgasbord.
All approach their sensitive subjects with originality and varying degrees of lightness. In “Two Distant Strangers,” the flashiest of the bunch and the most gut-punching, the directors Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe send a cheery graphic designer (the rapper Joey Bada$$) through multiple “Groundhog Day” encounters with a murderous New York City police officer. Clever and sinewy and upsetting, this 29-minute nightmare wraps a meditation on fate and helplessness in gleaming primary colors and a buoyantly optimistic lead performance.
In “Feeling Through,” Artie (played by the deaf-blind actor Robert Tarango) is far from helpless, confidently enlisting a troubled, initially unwilling teenager (Steven Prescod) to locate his bus stop. But as their chance encounter evolves, the teen realizes that this calm, open stranger may have a more satisfying life than he does. Written and directed by Doug Roland, and inspired by a personal encounter, this thoughtful movie makes its points with more heart than dialogue.
Still on the gentler side, Elvira Lind’s “The Letter Room” is one of several nominees that seek the human being beneath the uniform. Richard (Oscar Isaac) is a kindly corrections officer whose job entails reading all prisoner correspondence. Alone in a featureless room, he becomes entranced by the vividly personal letters addressed to a death row inmate and is compelled to violate his professional and ethical boundaries. Artfully using space and silence to deepen the film’s emotions, Lind (Isaac’s spouse) turns Richard’s face into a map of loneliness and longing.
A stolen bicycle sparks a personal transformation in “White Eye,” Tomer Shushan’s perceptive drama set in Tel Aviv and filmed in a single, fluid take. When a young man (Daniel Gad) discovers his bicycle has been acquired by an African migrant, he begins to question whether the fate of the machine is more important than that of its new owner.
Nowhere do the program’s recurring themes — the meaning of home, the elusiveness of safety and the necessity of connection — congregate more prominently than in “The Present.” As a Palestinian man (Saleh Bakri) and his young daughter set out on a shopping trip, they must navigate a West Bank bristling with checkpoints and armed soldiers. Deftly easing the tone from tender to tense and back again, the Palestinian-British director Farah Nabulsi cautions us to be mindful of freedoms too often taken for granted. JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Animation
A disco-loving rabbit, a metamorphosing young woman, a round-headed tyrant feasting at the top of the food chain: just a smattering of the characters you’ll find in this year’s collection of Oscar-nominated animated short films.
There’s the usual right-as-rain ilk of contender, from Disney/Pixar, whose bread and butter is clean, uplifting family-friendly films. The director Madeline Sharafian doesn’t disappoint, bringing us the undeniably cute feel-good entry “Burrow.” With finesse and imagination — and of course ridiculously cute critters — “Burrow” tells the story of a rabbit trying to build herself an underground crib but discovering she needs the help of her new neighbors. The film’s playful map of this subterranean world, with a vast frog library and swanky ant bistro, is a delicious work of world-building.
In a similar vein, the quirky “Yes-People,” about the mundane goings on of a group of eclectic residents living their lives together in one apartment building, is a delightful offering from Iceland. The playful animation style (characters exaggeratedly rotund or twiggy with large, spindly features) and the comedic timing of the director Gisli Darri Halldorsson — rendered in the nonverbal parlance of facial expressions and body language — translates to any language.
While “Burrow” and “Yes-People” find laughs and kinship in community, the meticulously illustrated “Opera,” from Erick Oh, reveals where community and, broader, society, fail. Oh presents the endless cycle of production and destruction that defines human existence in the form of a pyramid, with each room inside reflecting the different class hierarchies and social divides. There’s religion, education and war, and then things start up all over again. Though magnificently detailed, the short, described as “a living piece of art,” works more like an eight-minute visual metaphor, an exhibit that could fit in a museum — a concept first, film second.
“If Anything Happens I Love You,” by Michael Govier and Will McCormack, is the timeliest entry, about a couple grieving the death of their daughter who is killed in a school shooting, but plods too heavily through its loss. The film’s predictable story and use of familiar visual tropes are less egregious than its gratuitous approach to the death: the sounds of gunshots, the sight of a last text.
But where there’s garish trauma in “If Anything Happens,” there’s the nuanced sorrow of the French short “Genius Loci,” the most experimental and ambitious of the offerings. The director Adrien Merigeau poetically renders the anxiety and ennui of a young woman who ventures through her city in a strange state of dissociation, as people and places around her transform and meld into an ever-shifting collage. Though completed months before the Covid-19 shutdown, “Genius Loci” feels presciently tied to the sense of isolation and loss that the last year has brought.
In the animated world we find the same individual griefs and isolation, the same communal ills and tragedies, that we already know. The trick? Finding what’s new — and eye-catching — in the familiar. MAYA PHILLIPS
Documentary
This year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts differ so much in subject matter, approach and aesthetics that it’s hard to know where voters’ priorities will lie.
In Anthony Giacchino’s “Colette,” Colette Marin-Catherine, a former French resistance member, agrees, at 90, to visit the concentration camp in Nordhausen, Germany, where her brother, who was also in resistance, died. A history student, Lucie Fouble, accompanies her.
Colette doesn’t romanticize her wartime bravery. She wasn’t close with her brother, she insists, and is still hurt that her mother suggested Colette should have died instead. She is impatient with sanctimony: At a dinner in Nordhausen, she cuts off a former mayor’s speech. She doesn’t see how the “morbid details” at the camp could possibly help Fouble’s studies. Having little use for sanitized memories, “Colette” demonstrates a refreshing complexity and thorniness.
A different intergenerational exchange takes place in “A Concerto Is a Conversation,” a New York Times Op-Doc directed by Ben Proudfoot and the composer Kris Bowers (a piano double on “Green Book,” which he scored).
Bowers describes a concerto as a conversation between a soloist and an ensemble. On the occasion of the premiere of one he wrote, he interviews his grandfather. Horace Bowers Sr. hitchhiked across the country from Jim Crow-era Bascom, Fla., settling in Los Angeles. He built a successful business by obtaining mail-in loans. (When he applied in person, he says, he’d be denied because of the color of his skin.) The movie frames the men in alternating close-ups, speaking into the camera: They’re talking straight to us, from the heart.
The most action-packed entry is the journalist Anders Hammer’s “Do Not Split,” which captures the 2019 protests in Hong Kong from within the tumult. The film interviews protesters about their motivations and shows them in action, with the camera right in the middle of tear gas and flames. (A pulsing, “Tenet”-like score adds unnecessary embellishment.) The images of protesters wearing facial masks to protect their identities unavoidably evoke the pandemic, which arrives chillingly near the end: The streets, once filled with demonstrators, sit deserted.
“Hunger Ward” draws attention to the threat of famine in Yemen by observing two heroic medical workers, both women: Aida Hussein Alsadeeq, a doctor, and Mekkia Mahdi, a nurse, who do their best to keep alive, and raise the spirits of, malnourished children.
But the most stylistically adventurous nominee is “A Love Song for Latasha” (on Netflix), from the experimental documentarian Sophia Nahli Allison. Latasha is Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old killed in Los Angeles in 1991. The outrage over her shooting by a grocer is often cited as a factor in the 1992 riots.
Hardly purist in its approach to nonfiction, the film mixes interviews and constructed footage. Employing a variety of visual modes, it at times adopts the look of a VHS camcorder. When Tasha’s friend Tybie O’Bard shares memories of learning of the death, “Love Song” makes a wrenching shift to abstract animation. That’s a bold gambit for a documentary, and unexpected enough that it might portend a winner. BEN KENIGSBERG
The 2021 Oscar Nominated Short Films
Not rated. In English and several other languages, with subtitles. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.
Running times:
Live Action: 2 hours 10 minutes
Animated: 1 hour 39 minutes
Documentary: 2 hours 16 minutes
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