Ave Maria is the most humorous of this year’s
nominees for Best Live Action Short. It’s about the clash of cultures and
religious faiths in the settlements on the West Bank. Three Jews—a husband, his
wife, and his mother—crash their car into the statue of the Virgin Mary in
front of the home of the Sisters of Mercy. The five nuns there have taken a vow
of silence, so they are not able to help very much when their unexpected
visitors need help. For example, the Jews need someone to operate the phone for
them because their accident has occurred after Shabbat. They also keep kosher,
not something that the nuns have done, making even getting a drink of water
fraught with tension. This is a charming film overall and a quite funny one,
even though it traffics in stereotypes, and broadly so at times. I suppose
there’s a message here about how we can manage to live together even though we
come from very different backgrounds, but it’s probably lost on the audience
members, who are more likely just to chuckle at the plot.
Day One covers the first day on the job for a
woman serving as an American military translator in Afghanistan. It’s a
harrowing short film because she seems completely unready for the horrors of
war; almost everything upsets her and prompts her to claim that she can’t
accomplish any of the tasks she is assigned to do. Like Ave Maria, Day
One deals with the clash of cultures although the focus here is on the
occupiers (the United States military) and the occupied. When a pregnant woman
has complications while giving birth, the complications of gender arise. The
one doctor who is available is male and cannot be in the room with the mother;
his attempts to explain the necessary procedure to the translator fail, of
course. This is a well-made film overall, but the tone is rather somber and the
film is uncomfortable to watch on occasion.
Everything Will Be Okay, a German film,
is the longest and perhaps the most accomplished nominee. It is not, however,
an easy to film to watch. It begins simply with a father picking up his
daughter up from her mother’s house. We slowly learn that the parents are
divorced and that the father, who has apparently lost joint custody of his
daughter, is planning to run away with the child to Manila. We watch as he
takes her to a series of places to get ready to escape, obtaining an emergency
passport for his daughter and getting rid of his car so he will leave nothing
behind. The tension increases as the movie progresses, and it’s particularly frightening
to watch the little girl slowly gain awareness of what her father is doing.
He’s tried to distract her by getting her gifts and taking her to a fair, and
she seems to be having a great time when they are just having fun. However, the
second half is particularly grueling to watch, and the most difficult sequence
occurs when the mother and the police show up at the hotel room where he’s
hiding due to a flight delay. His desperation at trying to keep his daughter
from being taken away from him is heartbreaking. We don’t really get the
mother’s side of the story, but there is enough here to evoke both anger at and
empathy for the father. While this short could easily be expanded to become a
feature length film, it already stands as a complete and emotionally complex
story.
Shok follows the friendship of two Albanian
boys living in Kosovo during the Serbian takeover of the 1990s. One of the
boys, Petrit, convinces his friend Oki to take a bicycle to the camp where the
Serbian soldiers are headquartered. Petrit finds stuff to sell to the soldiers,
but one of them demands Oki’s new bike, claiming that Serbian children should
get bicycles before Albanians are allowed to have them. It’s pretty easy to get
angry watching a grown man take a bike from a child, but the suffering doesn’t
end there. The boys and other Albanians are harassed on the bus and have to
leave in a constant state of fear. The two central characters get upset with
each other and refuse to talk to each other from time to time, but they manage
to forgive each other and keep their friendship alive in the face of what is
happening to their people. In fact, the most harrowing sequence involves
Petrit’s family being forced out of their homes and only being allowed to take
a few possessions with them. A frame around the narrative involves Petrit, now
grown, discovering a bike on the road and taking it back to where his family
once lived. The frame device is really unnecessary, to be honest, because the
film is powerful and sad enough without it.
Stutterer is a charming romantic tale that features
as its title character a young typographer who has fallen in love with a woman
that he’s met online. By the way, who works as a typographer any longer? The
young man decides that she wants to meet in person to see if the relationship
can progress in real time, but he’s just too uncomfortable trying to talk to
people and is too anxious to take her up on her offer initially. He can speak
to his father the easiest, but every phone call that he makes is a disaster,
and you can sense just how frustrating it is for him to speak to anyone else.
The filmmakers present several of these phone calls to demonstrate how
difficult his life is. He doesn’t stutter in his thoughts, though, so the
narration of what he’s thinking, particularly the snarky characterizations he
makes of other people, is clear. The main character may not be the most
handsome fellow, but he is such a nice guy, and you root for him to be
successful in his love life. There are, of course, uncomfortable moments
because you sense that he might not be able to overcome his fears, but in true
romantic comedy fashion, the ending is a delightful and satisfying finish to
the plot. This is the shortest film among the nominees, but it manages to
convey a full and interesting story in only about eleven minutes.
Winner: Stutterer, a worthy choice given how the film manages to bridge a range of emotions honestly.
My Choice: Everything
Will Be Okay, the most technically polished and emotionally wrenching
of a pretty downbeat bunch of shorts.
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