Best Live Action Short Film of 2019

Brotherhood (Ikhwene) is set in Tunisia—the location for two of the shorts nominated in this category—at the home of a poor shepherd and his family. They live together in a one-room house. A prodigal son returns home after spending time fighting with ISIS, much to his father’s disapproval. The song also brings home a Syrian wife wearing a nigab, and their arrival demonstrates the tension between the Tunisians and the Syrians, at least on the part of the father. His wife is more supportive, even to the point of criticizing her husband’s behavior. The father’s skepticism and suspicious nature led to a heartbreaking conclusion. This is a sad movie that is only occasionally leavened by the fun of seeing the three red-haired sons interact with each other. The eldest regrets his decision to leave, but he’s too proud to admit it to his father. The tone of this film, like most of the ones nominated this year, is quite sad, a melancholy story. The cinematography is quite beautiful, but overall, Brotherhood is quite the somber short. Interesting sidenote: the film is a co-production of four countries, Canada, Tunisia, Qatar, and Sweden, an unusual mix, to say the least.

Nefta Football Club is also set in Tunisia, but it offers a somewhat more light-hearted plot than Brotherhood (or the other entries). Two young boys discover a donkey walking through the desert. It’s wearing a set of headphones and has been well trained to walk into Tunisia from a neighboring country. They realize that the donkey is carrying a lot of cocaine, and the two brothers decide to swipe it. To be fair, the younger brother doesn’t quite know what the white powder is; he mistakenly thinks it’s laundry detergent. The older brother knows exactly what it is, and he wants it so that he can get into the drug business and make some money for himself. Nefta Football Club offers some surprising humor, especially the ending. It’s really the funniest of the five options. The two guys who trained the donkey are quite funny, quite goofy in their bickering. The donkey’s disappearance results from a mix-up between the singer Adele and a Middle Eastern singer who seems to have a similar sounding name. One of them doesn’t understand who or what Pavlov (the scientist who gave us the theory of conditioning), and his friend’s exasperation is quite hilarious.

The Neighbors’ Window has a few fun moments, a few light-hearted laughs, but takes a rather dark turn about three-quarters through its run time. The premise seems inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window: a pregnant wife and her husband watch a couple in an apartment across the street; the new couple seems to be “breaking in” their new place by having sex with no shades or curtains serving as a barrier to voyeurs. The wife, in particular, becomes obsessed (although the husband has his moments) even to the point of using binoculars to watch while the lights in their apartment are dimmed to get a better view of the neighbors. By comparison, the people across the street have fun lives filled with parties and sex; meanwhile, the central couple are frequently tired from taking care of their three children. After the narrative shifts to a sadder outcome than originally anticipated, the focus seems to be demonstrating that you really shouldn’t be jealous of people you know very little about. The climax of The Neighbors’ Window actually ends up being rather unexpectedly upbeat and hopeful.

Saria depicts the horrifying abuse at a Guatemalan orphanage and the attempts by two sisters to develop a plan to escape to America. Saria, the title character, and her sister Ximena have few opportunities to talk when they aren’t being observed or harmed. The girls are raped, beaten, forced to do physical labor—a litany of corrupt mistreatment from those who are supposed to protect them and educate them. There are also apparently times when there’s no water for the girls to shower with. The boys at the orphanage join Saria, Ximena, and many of the girls in leaping from the building into a nearby tree. The police come after the escapees, and the brutal treatment at the orphanage will likely accelerate after their capture. The film is set at the same time as the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., that followed Trump’s inauguration in 2017, a momentary source of inspiration for the proto-feminist Saria. It’s based upon a real-life incident in which forty-one girls died in a fire. Saria, the short film (not the character), features some stellar camerawork and a great deal of narrative tension. It also features the fastest moving and perhaps the cleverest cockroach I’ve ever seen in a movie, an odd addition to such a serious story.

A Sister (Une soeur) is quite a harrowing film, a tense sixteen minutes. A young woman is in a car with a man. We’re not sure where they are headed, but she says she needs to call her sister. We listen to her side of the conversation, and then the film switches to an emergency call center where we discover that she’s actually called the Belgian equivalent of 911 instead. The viewer is never exactly certain what the man has done. Did he rape the woman? Kidnap her? A flashback reveals that there has been a sexual encounter, most likely without the woman’s full consent. The operator tries to decipher the clues that the woman gives, but the woman has to be very cryptic at times so as not to be caught by the man. The film goes back and forth between the woman in the car and the woman in the call center. A Sister could easily be expanded into a feature length film; the plot outlines are already there. We’d just need a bit more of what happened before the two people wind up in the car together and where they are headed.

Oscar Winner: The Neighbors’ Window, a very accomplished film with some very strong performances.

My Choice: Nefta Football Club balances very serious subject matter with some welcome moments of humor. In a field crowded with downbeat, depressing stories, it manages to inspire a range of emotional reactions.

Best Live Action Short Film of 2009

The Door is an Irish film about an incident that occurred in the former Soviet Union. I suppose by now most people have heard that the subject of the film is the aftermath of the accident at Chernobyl, but at the start of the film, we only know that an entire town is being evacuated. We are not explicitly told why. I first suspected that I was watching a Holocaust film, but the more contemporary clothing dissuaded me from that conclusion. We follow one family, primarily through a series of flashbacks, as they deal with the declining health of the daughter. When we see the end credits' reference to Chernobyl, the film makes sense in retrospect, but that doesn't make it any less bleak. It is a well-made film, certainly, but this is pretty dark material to watch.

Sweden's Instead of Abracadabra is the funniest of the nominated films. It's about a rather inept self-identified magician who still lives at home with his parents. He's really terrible at his craft, having seriously injured his mother in the famous trick of inserting a sword into a box containing a person. The magician's father wants him to take a more serious job, but the younger man knows that he can show everyone his talent and win the heart of a lovely nurse who's just moved in next door to his family's farm. There are many laughs to be had watching this film; it's the only one of the five that is primarily designed as a comic piece. After the screening I watched, almost everyone was repeating the magician's catch phrase of "Chimay!" (or something to that effect), suggesting that it was the one that stuck with people the longest.

Kavi is a co-production of India and the United States and deals with serious subject matter in a very restrained, adult way. The title character is an Indian boy whose family is forced to work at a brick factory in what amounts to slave labor. They are attempting to pay off a debt by making bricks, but we quickly get the sense that their debt will never be allowed to be paid in full. Despite efforts by government officials and activists to rescue the workers and despite attempts on Kavi's part to flee, the bosses always seem to succeed. This is not necessarily an easy film to watch, given how unflinchingly it depicts the forced labor that some in India must endure, but it is clear in its message and offers a sense of hope that young people like Kavi might be saved from a life of endless, brutal work. The writer-director, Gregg Helvey, graduated from one of my alma maters, the University of Southern California, but I was already impressed by this film (his master's thesis) before the end credits revealed that piece of information.

Miracle Fish is an Australian film about a little boy who, on his birthday, seeks refuge in the nurse's office at his school. He's been teased by some of the other boys at school for his lack of presents (save for the title fish, an odd piece of plastic that curves to tell your fortune or something—I never quite got a handle on this), and he just wants to get away from everyone for a while. When he wakes up from his nap, the school is empty. At first, the boy is very happy because it means he won't be teased any longer about being poor, but there are signs that something odd and dangerous has occurred. Much of the second half of the film is incredibly dark and rather frightening. Even though the subject of the film is a young boy, this is definitely not a movie for children.

The New Tenants is mostly just an actor's showcase, and as such, I found it to be a little dull. The title characters are a gay couple who have just moved into an apartment that was the site of a gruesome murder. We watch as one strange neighbor after another appears at their door, each one adding a little piece of information to the puzzle of what happened in the apartment. A couple of recognizable actors appear in this short, notably Vincent D'Onofrio and Kevin Corrigan, but the others (all character actors, unsurprisingly) are vaguely recognizable as well. The plausibility of the sequence of events was a bit much for me, and the ending is just a bit too bizarre. To be honest, I also didn't particularly enjoy the rather stereotypical depiction of gay characters either. At this point in our history, do we still need to be trafficking in stereotypes for the sake of overacting?

Oscar Winner: The New Tenants. I suspect that the quirkiness of the film coupled with the performances of actors many of the voters probably know personally was just too tempting to overlook. It is certainly an accomplished film, but I still feel unsatisfied with the ending, which seems to take the movie and its characters firmly out of the realm of the "real" where the film has (perhaps absurdly) kept them throughout the narrative.

My Choice: Kavi is the most accomplished of the five films. I admired it on almost every level: acting, directing, cinematography, you name it. It's also one of the most emotional films, and I think it earns the sympathy for its characters honestly. 

Best Live Action Short Film of 2015

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.

Best Live Action Short Films of 2013

Even though Aguel No Era Yo (That Wasn't Me) is a Spanish film, most of its action takes place in Africa and much of its dialogue is in English, making it perhaps the most international of the five nominees. Two doctors/medical aid workers and their guide are taken prisoner in an unnamed African country by a group of boy soldiers and their leader, the General. Most of the boys are in the General's "army" because they have apparently been orphaned in ongoing civil violence against the government, and they have fallen under the spell of a man who has taken over the role of stern father figure who pumps them up with claims of future glory and reward. The sequence of events involving and following the kidnapping is quite harrowing to watch. Part of the film is set years after the kidnapping, as one of the boy soldiers, "Corporal" Kaney, recounts for a school assembly what his experiences were like and how he had to disassociate himself psychologically to do some of the brutal actions that he did. This is a very intriguing film about an issue that deserves great attention, and it could easily be expanded into a full length film.

The longest short—yes, I realize how oxymoronic that sounds—Is the French film Avant Que de Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything). It concerns the attempt by Miriam, a department store clerk, to escape with her two children from an abusive relationship. That they are on the run is not apparent until about ten minutes into this thirty-minute gem of a movie. We can sense that something stressful is happening as Miriam picks up her son Julien, who is skipping school, and her daughter Josephine, who is distraught over having to leave her boyfriend. After she arrives at the store and tries to get some of her salary in order to have money to leave, Miriam and her daughter and son face a series of tension-building moments. One of the most intriguing aspects of this short is its ability to delineate sharply the different personalities of Miriam's co-workers. It's a masterful film, full of strong performances and depth of characterization.

Helium is a touching film about the friendship between Enzo, a hospital janitor, and Alfred, a terminally ill little boy whose room Enzo cleans. After sensing Alfred's fear of death, Enzo begins telling the boy about a place called Helium, an obvious allegory for Heaven but one which uses the boy's love of airships and hot air balloons to comfort him. This Danish film depicts the make-believe world of Helium in enchanting detail; it reminded me at times of a sunnier, sparklier version of those islands in the air of Avatar. Enzo enlists the help of one of Alfred's nurses so that he can tell Alfred the entire story that he's made up, and the final shot is quite touching.

Pitaako Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?) clocks in at just about seven minutes long, but it manages to pack in a lot of action in that brief period. This Finnish film shows the frantic preparations a family makes to get to a wedding on time. Almost everything goes wrong from the moment that they fail to wait up when the alarm clock rings. My favorite moment occurs when the two daughters, after their mother has told them to put on the kinds of clothes people wear to parties (because the nice dresses they were going to wear the wedding are still in the washing machine), emerge dressed as a witch and as Pippi Longstocking. It's a cute but rather insubstantial film.

The Voorman Problem is the only one of the films with international star power. Martin Freeman, taking a break from his Hobbit duties, portrays a psychiatrist called to a prison to examine the title character played by Tom Hollander. Voorman claims that he is a god or the God, and Freeman's Dr. Williams must determine whether or not to have the prisoner declared insane before he causes a riot among the inmates who have started to accept Voorman's claims. A lot of this short is just Freeman and Hollander (usually confined by a straitjacket) talking across a table, but there are a couple of moments that flesh out Dr. Williams' life outside the prison walls, and there are several contemporary references that date the events being depicted. It's a clever enough film, I suppose, but it coasts primarily on the charm of its two lead actors, and the twist at the end is not as surprising as the filmmakers might have expected it to be.

Oscar Winner: Helium. This is a heartfelt film that displays a great deal of tenderness toward the boy and his fears of dying. Handling such delicate subject matter requires a difficult balancing act, and this short film is always honest in its depictions of what the boy and the janitor are experiencing. 

My Choice: Either Aguel No Era Yo and Avant Que de Tout Perdre. Both are fully developed, fully realized stories that are gripping and intense. I'd have a tough time choosing between them, given that they are both quite polished work and deal with important subject matter (maybe that should be Important Subject Matter) in such an emotional yet sincere way. I'd probably give a slight edge to the French film because the characters are so well written and realistic in their actions. 

Best Live Action Short Film of 2008

Auf Der Strecke (On the Line), a German film, tells the story of a department store security employee who spends much of his free time (and quite a bit of work time) pining away for a pretty young woman who works in the book department of the store. He never speaks to her, of course, but watches her on the surveillance camera and even rides the same subway that she does so that he can continue to look at her. You begin to think that this is going to be a creepy film about a stalker, but then she boards the train with a handsome young man one night, and she and the young man begin to fight. After she abruptly leaves the train, the young man is attacked by three young thugs, who beat him to death. The security guard watches much of this, but he does nothing, perhaps jealous of the woman's affections for the young man. When the guard discovers that the young man is her brother, he tries—haltingly—to make amends. (Those German filmmakers and their sense of guilt...where would they be without it?) This film has an interesting story and some technical prowess, but I don't know that it would stand out to me in a field of hundreds of other short films of similar skill at storytelling and camera work and editing. This is the longest of the five films at 30 minutes, and it has the most fully developed plot.

New Boy, a film from Ireland, tells the story of a young boy from Africa who arrives at a grammar school in Ireland, only to be picked on by one of the Irish boys. Through a series of flashbacks, we discover that the young African boy has left his home country due to the military's arrest and probably murder of his father, a schoolteacher. The kids in his new class are an intriguing lot overall, most of them fitting pretty clear "types." The resolution of the story is charming, coming as it does on the heels of the most dramatic of the young boy's flashbacks to Africa. Again, this film is competently made, and it was fun to hear the Irish accents, but I'm not sure that it would stand out in a field of short films so distinctly either. It's the shortest of the five, clocking in at a brisk 11 minutes.

Toyland (Spielzeugland), is also from Germany, and it mines more familiar territory: the Holocaust. A young German boy is friends with the Jewish family downstairs; in fact, he and the son of the Jewish family play the piano together. When he learns that the Jewish family will be leaving soon, he wants to know why he can't go. When his mother tries to tell him that they are going to Toyland, that just makes him all the more excited to join them. What she can't tell him, of course, but what we all know is that they are on the way to the concentration camps; foolishly, she makes up a destination that only entices her son rather than discourages him. On the morning that the Nazis arrive to take the family downstairs into custody, the young German boy packs his suitcase and tries to join them. Much of the film is the story of his mother trying to locate him, even going to the train station and having the officers open the railcar that contains her neighbors. The payoff for this film is strong, but I won't spoil it for you on the chance that you might get to enjoy seeing it on your own some day. Like New Boy, Toyland uses a series of flashbacks to tell its story, but the German film is more emotionally engrossing, perhaps because of the more detailed knowledge we have of the cultural context.

Grisen (The Pig) is a Danish film about an older man who enters a hospital to have surgery; he has an abscess in his rectum, a fact which he shares with almost everyone he meets. At first, he is in a hospital room by himself. In his solitude, he notices a painting on the wall of a pig leaping into a body of water. He becomes intrigued by the picture and starts to feel like it is a good luck charm for him. He even likens the expression on the pig's face to the smile on the Mona Lisa. (Well, it is a rather enigmatic look. The pig's look, I mean.) He awakens after one of his procedures to see that the painting has been removed and that another patient has joined him in the room. It turns out that the other patient is Muslim, and his family has asked for the painting to be removed because it offends them. A series of misadventures follows, including the hanging of a picture of a moose as an alternative. Frustrated, the elderly man calls in his daughter, the lawyer, and asks her to become involved. It's all rather comic, yet each "side" still makes an intriguing case regarding the limits of tolerance. The way the plot is resolved is the most ironic of all five films, but it too should really be experienced firsthand.

Manon Sur Le Bitume (Manon on the Asphalt), a French film, is perhaps the most challenging in terms of its structure. It begins with a series of images of various people going about their day. Then the central character of Manon hops on her bike and rides to meet someone. She is struck by a car and, while she fades in and out of consciousness, begins to think about the various people in her life and what she last said to them and key memories of their times together and how they might react to her death. All of these people are, of course, the ones we saw in the opening sequence. The film ends with a series of images involving the same people, but I'm not certain that the narrative has been fully or satisfactorily resolved when that sequence begins. As intriguing as this film sounds, I'm not sure that it is executed as skillfully as it could have been.

Oscar Winner: Toyland. Perhaps it was the darker theme of the German short film that made it stand out more. It is the most resonant of the films in terms of its emotional impact.

My Choice: The Pig. It's sense of humor is charming, yet it manages to make some intriguing social commentary about tolerance and justice.