Opening this week are the Oscar Nominated Shorts Programs,
the popular annual showcase of the animated, live-action, and documentary short
films nominated for an Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. The 2020 nominees
are a remarkably strong collection of films, and in a year when the Academy
again made news for not nominated any female filmmakers for its directing category,
it’s heartening to see so many women directors represented across each of these
programs.
As usual,
the shorts are split into separate programs based on category (the documentary
shorts will be screened together instead of split into two programs as in
previous years).
Animated Shorts
Moscow-born filmmaker Daria Kashcheeva’s
melancholy drama “Daughter” explores the relationship
between a woman and her estranged father. Sitting with her ailing father by his
hospital bed, the woman retreats into her memories, focusing on a moment of
childhood misunderstanding that carried a reverberating impact on their
relationship over the years.
The sweet,
funny, and heartfelt “Hair Love,” from directors Matthew
A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr., and Bruce W. Smith, centers on the relationship
between an African-American father and his daughter, as he faces one of his
biggest parenting challenges yet: doing her hair for the first time.
The adorable
“Kitbull” is one of the first batch of films created under Pixar’s SparkShorts
program, which provides the studio’s young artists with limited resources to
produce their own independent passion projects. Director Rosana
Sullivan uses simple but wonderfully expressive 2D character design to show the
unexpected bond that forms between a scrappy stray kitten and a gentle pit
bull.
Bruno
Collet’s somber “Mémorable” offers a heartbreaking window into the mind of a painter stricken with
Alzheimer’s. Objects melt and morph, and the film’s images grow increasingly
surrealistic as the man’s deteriorating memory leaves him lost in a strange,
untethered reality.
Siqi Song’s “Sister” finds a man recalling his childhood memories of growing up with a pesky kid
sister in 1990s China. Told through black-and-white felt stop-motion that recalls
the fuzzy texture of childhood memory, the film builds to a surprisingly
emotional conclusion.
Documentary Shorts
Chronicling the deadly 2014 sinking of the Sewol passenger
ferry in South Korea, Yi Seung-Jun’s harrowing “In the Absence,” uses footage recovered from the sunken
vessel and interviews with surviving family members to deliver a fierce
condemnation of the failures in leadership and communication that led to the
unnecessary deaths of hundreds aboard the ship.
In “Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl),” director
Carol Dysinger trains her camera on the day-to-day
operations of a school for girls in Kabul, where students learn to read, write,
and — somewhat unexpectedly — skateboard. It’s an inspiring tale of courage and
how education can be its own unique form of resistance.
John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson’s “Life
Overtakes Me” focuses on three refugee families living in Sweden,
each with a young child afflicted with “resignation syndrome,” a mysterious,
dissociative condition causing them to retreat into an unresponsive, coma-like
state for months on end. A sobering look at a little-reported effect of the
global refugee crisis.
“St. Louis Superman” follows Bruce Franks Jr., a Ferguson
activist and battle rapper turned member of Missouri’s overwhelmingly white and
Republican House of Representatives. Directors Smriti Mundhra and Sami Khan chronicle Franks’ efforts
against the epidemic of gun violence in his city, as they capture a stirring
portrait of one man’s fight to make a difference.
Directed by
Fairport native Laura Nix, “Walk Run Cha-Cha” tells the touching story of Paul and
Millie Cao, who fell in love as teenagers in Vietnam but were too quickly
separated by the war. Years later they finally reunited in California, and
after decades of working to build new lives together they find a shared passion
in ballroom dancing.
Live Action Shorts
An emergency phone operator receives a call from a woman
trapped in her kidnapper’s moving car in “A
Sister.” A bit reminiscent of the 2018 Danish feature “The
Guilty,” Delphine Girard’s thriller is nonetheless a masterclass of economical
storytelling and escalating tension.
In the stark
drama “Brotherhood,” a shepherd living in
rural Tunisia with his wife and two sons finds himself deeply shaken when his
eldest son returns home from fighting in Syria, with his pregnant wife in tow. It’s
well-acted, but the contrived storytelling — having characters withhold crucial
information for no clear reason — ends up fatally undercutting the impact.
The only
comedy in the live-action crop, the winning “Nefta Football Club” finds two young brothers
happening across a headphone-wearing donkey strapped with a massive amount of
cocaine while wandering in the desert. When one brother decides to use their
discovery for his own gain, this story takes some delightfully unexpected
turns.
In Bryan
Buckley’s “Saria,” two sisters dream of
escaping to a better life while facing daily abuse and hardship at the Virgen de La Asunción
Safe Home, a Guatemalan girl’s orphanage that became the scene of a 2017
real-life tragedy. A compelling story, but one that I couldn’t help feeling
would benefit from a feature-length treatment.
A pair of
harried New York City parents face a crisis when a young, free-spirited couple
moves into the apartment facing theirs in “The
Neighbors’ Window.” As they find themselves increasingly obsessed
with observing the couple’s carefree lives, Marshall Curry wrings plenty of
emotion, humor, and heart from this “grass is always greener” tale.
Adam
Lubitow is a freelance writer for CITY. Feedback on
this article can be directed to becca@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2020.
