2019 Oscar Nominated Short Films: Documentaries

Documentary

Period. End of Sentence

In our current democratic crisis, when all attempts at advocacy are met with dismissive partisan insults, perhaps the best we can do is to simply depict suffering without comment. It’s just what they teach you on the first day of film school: Show, don’t tell. Politically and artistically, the best of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts demonstrate the benefits of this approach. They shine a spotlight on the troubles we would rather not look at and hold it there, forcing us to see what we have, consciously or not, kept hidden in the shadows.

Given the world offscreen, it seems right that two of the nominees expose bigotry. A Night at the Garden unearths footage of a massive Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939. Shot in black-and-white, its grainy stock only underlines its authenticity, and even at a tight five-minute running time, its images—like that of 20,000 Americans giving the Nazi salute, or a protestor getting roughly handled by police—leave a mark. With no commentary or voiceover, this found footage paints a haunting picture of what it looks like when bigotry is structuralized.

Meanwhile, Black Sheep succeeds as a visual memoir in which Cornelius Walker, an African immigrant in England, tells of how he worked to fit in as a teenager in his new country. Surrounded by racists in his small town, he bleached his skin and wore blue contact lenses, betraying his identity for the sake of peace. Director Ed Perkins paints his portrait in bold strokes. Walker tells his story direct to camera, but Perkins dramatizes it with actors. The intense memory poem is buttressed by a sharp, dissonant score, and his palette of nighttime colors visualizes the danger to Walker’s body and soul.

Bodies and souls are also at stake in End Game, a Netflix documentary about end-of-life care for five individuals. Using its intimate style to highlight the patients’ inherent vulnerability, it finds beauty, agony, frustration, and even joy in the dying process. “It could be terrible, and it could be wonderful,” one patient says of her death. “This part of my life has been wonderful, and who would have thought?” Moments of sheer wisdom are scattered throughout its 40-minute runtime, but I wished it had either stayed with one character, or more evenly allotted its narrative time. The story of Mitra, a loving mother and wife, gets the bulk of the screen time, probably due to her pained family’s willingness to be filmed so transparently. Other patients get only token representation, leaving End Game, despite its occasional power, offering either too much or not enough.

Period. End of Sentence. suffers at times from the same malady, although it would surely win an award for having the most clever title. It tracks the efforts of disadvantaged women in India who start their own sanitary pad producing company. It’s most edifying moments come early on, when the depths of India’s taboo against discussing menstruation are revealed in interviews with ordinary young men and women. The film quickly runs out of steam, however, diverting the audience from its noticeable lack of drama with cutesy music and a reliance on quick cuts. There may be a powerful human story here, but instead the filmmaker opts for a minor but effective tale of female empowerment. It could easily win.

There is nothing minor about Lifeboat, the likely Oscar winner, which chronicles the efforts of a crew sent by a German nonprofit organization to distressed refugee boats in the Mediterranean Sea. The images of dozens of people—including pregnant women and children—crammed so tightly into a small raft that their legs dangle over the side are unshakeable. The direct-to-camera testimonials are equally powerful, especially that of the British captain of the rescue ship, who evokes a barely there optimism that is apt for our moment: “Maybe hope in humans is a mad, irrational thing we’ve got. But we’ve got it, anyway.” (NG)