Oscar Nominated Live Action Movies
A Review?
WRITTEN BY DAN MCDONALD
A still from each of the 5 Oscar nominated Live Action
Short Movies
I
consider myself fortunate to have been able to watch the five movies nominated
for an Academy Award in the live action short movie category. I don’t know how
many theaters are showing the selections, but watching 5 short well made movies
from different nations was for me a wonderful and powerful experience impacting
me on numerous emotional and intellectual levels. If you get a chance to see
these movies I can only recommend. I wouldn’t consider some of these movies
suitable for children, but others might disagree so accept this warning and do
with it as you do. But in each and every instance you will see a short movie
that is a profound expression of the human story in our world. I also want to
thank the Circle Theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma for showing this collection of
short movies.
The first of the 5 films I viewed
was the enjoyable light hearted “Ave Maria” where three Orthodox Jewish
travelers are involved in an accident putting themselves in harm’s way on a
road for Arabs. (Notice the photo on the upper right hand corner of the
photograph collection introducing the piece) They find themselves as the sun is
setting on a Friday afternoon having to find help from Arabs as the Sabbath is
beginning. They have their accident at a convent where the sisters involved
(Palestinian Catholics) are practicing silence. The youngest sister, I believe
a novice, gets up from her meal to answer the door in a not too pleased mood. There
follows a scene where the Orthodox man tries to get use of the convent’s rotary
phone to obtain help from a Jewish towing service on the Sabbath on a road
meant for Arabs. There follows a delightful story of interfaith dialogue
between sisters who have taken vows of silence and an Orthodox Jewish man who
has a very limited amount of physical activities he can actually do on the
Sabbath with a clear conscience. The Orthodox man explains that he cannot dial
the rotary phone because it is the Sabbath. The service falls upon the young
sister who without saying anything is rather put out by the guest unable to
dial a rotary phone because it is the Sabbath who was however quite capable of
being able to invade the quiet of a convent during the sisters’ simple supper.
She dials the number for him and then he points to his ear, asking for her to
place the earpiece to his ear since it is the Sabbath. At this point a bumpy
spot on the road of interfaith dialogue takes place when the young nun
demonstrably places the phone piece on the desk leaving the Orthodox man to
determine if his speaking to the tow truck service is important enough for him
to break his Sabbath by picking up the phone piece. She is not going to hold
the headpiece up to his ear for even a moment. It is a delightful movie made in
Israel, where most people know the people on the other side are human but lives
are lived separated to the point that almost no one knows understand the other.
This short film was delightful, enjoyable, and full of comedic situations, but
it was also a cry for the need of human interaction between divided peoples.
A second piece was “Day One” an
American piece represented by the photograph on the lower left corner of the
introducing photograph. The movie was made by a filmmaker who served in
Afghanistan and devoted the piece to his admiration of the translators who
worked the American military, providing essential skills to enable
communication between American soldiers and the people living in the area where
American soldiers were serving. The film shows the complexity of the situation
when a soldier on a motorcycle passes the new interpreter on the road and then
almost instantly afterwards is killed when hitting an IED. The soldiers then
look for the ones responsible for the placing of the IED. They believe they
have found a man, who is responsible only to discover the man with bomb
material also has a pregnant wife about to give a difficult birth. The scene
becomes a scene where enemies momentarily come together in an attempt to bring
a child into the world. A sense of each other’s humanity pervades as the
terrorist is seen as a man devoted to his family who is as much defending his
land and home as American soldiers believe themselves to be defending their
land and home. The American woman, a translator and bridge between two
different cultures is forced to take on responsibilities bigger than she could
have ever expected. This piece seems to me to want us to respect the human
stories of our soldiers involved in the Middle Eastern conflicts, while helping
us to realize the complexities of the situations we are asking our soldiers to
be participants in as they serve in areas where even if we are there to try to
stabilize situations, we become part of an even greater complexity in the
region.
The third piece was a German and
Austrian film, “Everything will be okay.” This movie is represented in the
bottom center frame. Of course, as one reviewer pointed out you begin to wonder
immediately when you see “Everything will be okay” as a movie title if everything
will be okay. The movie begins with a seeming innocent scene as a father,
divorced from his daughter’s mother, picks up the daughter from her mother and
stepfather. The daughter is happy to see her dad and they go away for their
special time together. But gradually the daughter becomes aware that her father
is planning to take her away from her home more permanently. The story of a
daughter caught in the middle, a father lost in his inability to deal wisely
with the situation he wishes but cannot legally change is told with no graphic
violence in what as one critic described as shown in “a gut wrenching manner”.
A fourth short movie was “Shok”
(Friend) of two Albanian friends growing up in the region of Kosovo during the
days when Serbian forces were attempting to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of the
Albanian population. This movie is represented by the scene shown on the upper
left hand corner of the introducing photograph. The movie begins with a scene two
men in a car have to stop suddenly because of a bicycle lying in the road. The
driver vents his frustration, but the passenger inexplicably gets out of the
car, to remove the bicycle from the road telling the driver to go on ahead without
him. The man looks at the bicycle and as he takes it off the road begins to
think back on a story of his childhood in the dark days when Serbian militia
was trying to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of its Albanian population. The movie
then tells the story of the friendship of two boys seeking manhood in a
dangerous world. The story is dark, sometimes painful, and ultimately powerful.
A fifth and final piece was an
offering from the UK called “Stutterer”. The movie is about a man whose crippling
disability is stuttering to the point that his life is lived in virtual isolation.
The scene representing this movie is shown in the lower right hand frame of our
introducing set of photographs. The stutterer has a friend online, with whom a
pleasant virtual online relationship is forming. But the satisfying virtual
online experience becomes the potential experience of shattering heartbreak
when the lady from afar excitingly expresses that she will be in London for a
few days and would like to meet him. He struggles to answer. He wants to meet
her but he is naturally terrified that the result of the meeting will be an end
to the virtual friendship in which he had discovered joy. He is terrified by
the inability to be in reality what he is in the virtual online world. It seems
to be a feature of modern life that for many of us we reach a point where life
seems to inform us that we incompetent or completely crippled to the point that
a satisfying real relationship is beyond our possibilities. The film might
portray a stutterer, but the foreboding of a satisfying virtual relationship
being brought into the world of reality plays out in life millions of times in
our modern world where for some reason we often seem more capable of entering
meaningful virtual relationships while being petrified of the possibility of
real ones. So the movie while portraying the special situation of one
struggling with a handicap can also be seen as a movie appealing to a much more
universal audience as we so easily enter virtual relationships while we panic
as we contemplate the potential of beginning a friendship in real life.
I have tried to write shorter blogs
this year, but hopefully this exception to my attempt to write briefer blogs
will be a worthy exception to the rule. Watching these five short movies in a
single setting was for me a powerful experience that moved me in different ways
as I watched each of these movies. In the end perhaps it is the diversity of
human experience in differing settings, different conflicts, told in stories
either light or dark, discouraging or enriching, tragic or comic, that somehow
reaches into our souls and reminds us that the human story is a story both to
be lived out in our individual uniqueness and in the breadth of our shared
human experience. I will only say that I would be happy to see any of these
stories of our humanity be given an Oscar for the Live Action category.
Watching the five nominated movies for this category I have learned to
appreciate that short movies do not mean lesser movies. Each of these movies is
film making at its best. I hope that you will get a chance to see if you agree
with me. I hope to add all of these short films to my personal film collection.
