The Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films of 2016

[StevePulaski]

Ave Maria (2015)
Directed by: Basil Khalil

Rating: ★★½

France's Oscar-nominated short film Ave Maria is a screwball comedy of sorts, with its main idea revolving around religious tolerance and a desire for conflicting theologians to come together and realize the common good of reaching a goal. Revolving around a group of Israelis that break down in Palestine, Ave Maria depicts contemporary Israel/Palestine relations by having the gang of individuals look for assistance from five nuns.

As one can predict, comedic circumstances do ensue, particularly when the Palestinians are hesitant to even let the Israelis use their telephone. However, once they realize that they can do more by helping the innocent people of Israel rather than further hurting or tormenting them, some cooperation begins to occur. The unsubtle themes of Ave Maria almost effectively undermine the entire film, despite its mildly amusing comedic setup and its strong, albeit flaccid, core theme that emphasizes togetherness rather than further separation. The entire short is quietly entertaining, but questionably Oscar worthy.

Shok (2015)
Directed by: Jamie Donoughue

Andi Bajgora and Lum Veseli.

Rating: ★★★

Shok takes place during the brutal Kosovo War, a war which divided Albanians and Serbians. Writer/director Jamie Donoughue showcases the war through the eyes of two young Albanian boys, Petrit and Oki (Lum Veseli and Andi Bajgora), who are harassed by Serbian soldiers one day, which results in Petrit making a deal with one of the soldiers that involves selling Oki's bicycle. Disgusted at his friends' compliance with the enemy, the two briefly separate before realizing that they are all they have in a war-torn land.

Rather than revolving around a coming of age narrative that is ripe for yet another tired showcase of innocence lost, Donoughue is diligent with emphasizing friendship and the need for trusting someone when everyone but your family seems like the enemy. There is a constant feeling of dread throughout the entire picture, and just when you feel the short will end rather inconsequentially, it hits you with a riveting and unexpected sequence that will affect the lives of the boys forever.

Shok nicely paces itself in that it almost forces you to let your guard down as a viewer, forgetting to expect the unexpected, before hitting you with an emotional punch that comes effectively in the latter half of the short. While Donoughue enters the narrative from a fairly easy point of entry - focusing on two young, innocent boys - comes with a story to tell and not with an agenda, which is all too easy to do with short films like this one. It's all worth it for that riveting and heartwrenching final shot that feels burned into my retina, at least temporarily.

Everything Will Be Okay (2015)
Directed by: Patrick Vollrath

Julia Pointner.

Rating: ★★★½

"Everything will be okay" is a good summation of the themes for this year's batch of Oscar-nominated live action short films and it's an appropriate title for Germany/Austria's nominee for the respective category. The title comes from the phrase that people state to others when they're most likely rather unsure of what a situation's outcome will be, and in this particular short, it's often said by a divorced father (Simon Schwarz) to his young daughter (Julia Pointner), whom he plans to dart off with to Manila via a last minute flight. The father already hates the fact that the time with his precious baby girl is so limited that he winds up taking her shopping for a few toys before he goes to get an emergency passport and an airline ticket for a flight that winds up being delayed until the next morning. The two spend the night in a hotel where the little girl makes possibly the most courageous move of her life.

Everything Will Be Okay works, for one, because it's predicated upon a simple relationship that most of us will recognize and, if nothing else, softly admire. A father's bond with his daughter is sentimental and tender, and taking that away from any man is bound to cause some sort of friction or added pain to his already reeling heart from a failing marriage. With that, while we may not agree with the plan he has crafted for his daughter, we nonetheless understand his motivations and why he'd want to do something like this.

Vollrath creates a short that is built off of two things - a skeptical child's strong will and looming suspense and the feeling that something isn't quite right. We see a father's repeated plea to his daughter that things are simply complicated and are what they are, and she, no matter how many times he says it, isn't buying it. She wants to stay with her mother and doesn't understand why staying with her mother makes it that much harder for her father to regularly see her. It's a complicated issue and both parties are so stubborn that they can't take each others behavior much longer.

Furthermore, the way Vollrath positions this story is pretty intriguing to say the least. The camera is frequently fixated in bird's eye view angles, often knocking us down to about the height and stature of the little girl. With that, we never really get a sense of what the father is doing by way of his own words, so the overall effect is like we're in the shoes of the little girl, simply picking up what we can and going from there. While Everything Will Be Okay is a strong drama, it also has beautiful elements of a thriller and works to be the most favorable of the lot of live actions shorts we've been graced with this year, thanks to its inherently simplicity but added narrative and aesthetic complexity.

Stutterer (2015)
Directed by: Benjamin Cleary

Matthew Needham in Stutterer.

Rating: ★★★½

If Everything Will Be Okay is this year's most favorable Oscar-nominated live action short, then Stutterer is a close runner-up with its light-hearted, albeit slightly tragic, narrative about a man who's thoughts in his head are crystal-clear but the words out of his mouth are shaky and lack confidence. The short revolves around a lonely typographer named Greenwood (Matthew Needham), who has struggled with enunciation and basic communication all his life due to his stammer, to the point where it's easier to use sign language than to even try to muster up the strength to communicate - let alone have the other party be patient enough to hear him out. He makes the street-corner preacher in Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing sound like a public speaker.

Greenwood has spent most of his days on Facebook, communicating with a woman he's been in an online relationship with for six months. He desperately wants to meet her, but knows she'll be disappointed. In his head, his words flow perfectly, with a buttery consistency and melodic depth that makes his presence assertive. Despite this, it takes Greenwood a good forty-five seconds to get eight words out and we can see the mental hopscotch and exhaustion it takes just to get those eight words out of his mouth.

Benjamin Cleary doesn't position Stutterer in a way that makes us sob or even tear up at Greenwood's situation, largely because he creates a character and not a vessel that demands manipulative sympathy. He wants us to see Greenwood as a person, with deep thoughts and ideas, rather than an empty soul manufactured so we can have someone to look down upon and feel sorry for. It's also arguably the most tonally consistent short film of the lot, largely because of its brevity and its very simplistic structure and makeup (very direct, straight-shot sequences with many close-ups and bust shots making for a very serviceable look).

With that, Stutterer becomes a beautiful little romance, and actually has the weight and potential to turn into a charming, full-length feature similar to Shawn Christensen's Oscar-winning short Curfew and its eventually evolution into the terrific film Before I Disappear in 2013.

Day One (2015)
Directed by: Henry Hughes

Layla Alizada.

Rating: ★★½

Co-writer and director Henry Hughes realized his filmmaking dream after his two tours of duty in Afghanistan, and with a little assistance from Star Wars creator George Lucas, crafted his pipe-dream of a short film into a reality with a potential for an Oscar. The result is Day One, a mostly effective short film revolving around an interpreter for the United States Army, who is put in the compromising position when she is forced to deliver a baby for an enemy bombmaker's wife. The baby's position has shifted in the mother's uterus, to the point where its hand is sticking out of the mother's crotch without any discernible pulse. The only option, as told by the doctor, is to cut the baby's arm off and extract its corpse piece-by-piece.

The horrifying bloodbath races through the mind of the woman (Layla Alizada), who never believed she'd have to do anything close to this. Time is running out, the mother is in excruciating pain, and dread and uncertainty looms over the household like a gray cloud.

For the first half of its twenty-five minute runtime, Hughes prefers to capture the situation in a way that's largely naturalistic; one that emphasizes ambient noise and appropriate sounds of the location rather than mawkish music. However, but the third act, the short slowly devolves into incredulous territory, where the impossible becomes the possible and the conflict at hand is solved all too easily. The circumstance that was potentially catastrophic a moment ago has turned into optimism ripe for emotional exploitation and the short concludes down a path I was crossing my fingers it wouldn't take the whole time.

Still, Day One is worth it for the strong performance by Alizada, who manages to command the screen pretty admirably throughout the entire film, and Hughes really knows how to craft an unforgivably tense environment. With that, Day One seems like its inching towards greatness only to hesitantly back off in favor of a safer route most people would find easier to swallow.