While much of the fanfare each Oscar season goes to Best Picture, Best Director, and the various acting categories, some of the most unique and captivating work of the past year in cinema can often be found in the short film categories: Best Documentary Short Film, Best Short Film (Animated), and Best Short Film (Live Action). In past years, the nominated shorts have been a mixed bag, with films that range from bleak and obnoxiously “edgy,” to mawkish and overly message-driven. This year’s crop of nominees are among the strongest contenders I’ve seen in years of watching the Oscar-nominated short films – all worthy nominees and thoroughly engaging works of short cinema.
I always find the short films difficult to predict – I often try to outthink the Academy voters and they end up picking what I think is a left-field choice. Still, I’ll do my best to offer some brief thoughts on the nominees, my prediction for the winner, a possible spoiler, and who I hope will win on Oscar night.
Best Documentary Short Film
Kartiki Gonsalves’s The Elephant Whisperers is a sweet eco-documentary about two workers in an elephant sanctuary who care for baby elephants. The film is beautifully shot and features some heart-tugging footage of the elephants with their custodians.
Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev’s Haulout is a more brutal and pointed ecological documentary that explores the devastating effects of climate change on the animal world. Like the previous film, it’s beautifully shot, but the spare conversation and exquisite sound design make this a haunting cinematic experience.
Spoiler: Stranger at the Gate
Preference: Haulout (though most of these are strong choices)
Best Short Film (Animated)
Peter Baynton and Charlie Mackesy The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is a lovely children’s fable about confronting uncertainty and fear in the world around us. The animation is lovely, the voice-acting gentle and soothing, and while it’s mostly comprised of a series of aphorisms around a loose narrative, I think these are truths we could all stand to hear in this angry and fractured time.
Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby’s The Flying Sailor is a visually inventive short that uses a variety of animation styles to tell the true story of a sailor who was thrown four kilometers after an explosion in the Halifax Harbor. The integration of styles is stunning and the approach the filmmakers take to visualizing your life flashing before your eyes is compelling, but when compared to some of the other nominees, the film is thematically thin.
João Gonzalez’s Ice Merchants is a beautifully animated short about a father and son who gather ice each day from their cliff-side dwelling and sell it by parachuting down to the village below. The animation is deceptively simple, with elongated line drawings creating a sense of vertigo and disorientation, and there is a subtle grief that compounds the longer you watch the film, until the ending is as overwhelming and powerful and the film’s final visual image.
Sara Gunnarsdóttir’s My Year of Dicks is a charming, playful, and visually delightful short film that follows the misadventures of a teenage girl as she attempts to lose her virginity over one year in the early ‘90s. It’s a painfully honest film about what it’s like to grow up and continually choose the wrong relationships – all of which are rendered in their own animation styles which evoke the nature of each of Pam’s misadventures over the course of this fateful year.
Lachlan Pendragon’s An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It is a stunning, bleak, and very funny existential work of short animation about an office drone who begins to notice terrifying things about the world around him. The metafictional aspects are hilarious and unnerving (complete with Brechtian distancing techniques like showing most of the film through a camera monitor or having the animator’s hands in the background of most shots), and the character’s dilemma is extremely compelling.
Prediction: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
Spoiler: My Year of Dicks
Preference: An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It (though I’d be very happy to see Ice Merchants, My Year of Dicks, or The Boy… win)
Best Short Film (Live Action)
Ross White and Tom Berkeley’s An Irish Goodbye is a sweet and heartwarming comedy about two brothers attempting to fulfill the last wishes of their recently deceased mother. The film is frequently hilarious and manages to avoid sentimentalizing the relationship between the young man and his brother with Down syndrome, though it relies too heavily on montage and puerile humor to hold together as tightly as a film of this length should.
Anders Walter and Pipaluk K. Jørgensen’s Ivalu is a haunting tone poem about abuse, loss, and the facing of an unbearable truth about family and community indifference. The cinematography is exquisite, following Pipaluk through her village and into the surrounding countryside, and the voiceover work is heartbreaking.
Eirik Tveiten’s Night Ride is a charming film about a woman who accidentally steals a tram on her way home one cold winter night – and an incident between passengers she’s forced to confront. The film never loses its light touch, its sense of discovery and playfulness, but nonetheless explores our desire to ignore harassment and assault when we see it occurring, all the while challenging us toward intervention rather than passivity.
Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Pupille is a delightful, anarchic short for children about girls in fascist Italy forced into conformity by the nuns who run their boarding school – and the one little girl who decides to rebel. The film is gleeful, filled with stunning images and magnificent performances, and in an age where mindless conformity (especially in our children) is being prized more and more, it’s a wonderful lesson in standing up to authority.
Cyrus Neshvad’s The Red Suitcase is a tense, gripping short about an Iranian teenage girl who has been flown to Europe by her father in order to marry an older man – and her attempt to flee from him as he waits for her at the airport. This is an incredibly tight film (well paced, beautifully acted) with stakes that are continually raised (through language barriers, the titular red suitcase, an envelope discovered in the trash), showing the plight of girls and women across the world.
Prediction: Le Pupille
Spoiler: The Red Suitcase
Preference: Le Pupille
While you can find some of the films on various streaming platforms right now, all of the short films are available as part of the 18th Annual Oscar Nominated Short Film releases, presented by ShortsTV. You can find a theater playing the programs near you at http://www.shorts.tv/theoscarshorts.
