2020 Oscar Nominated Shorts: Documentary
Life Overtakes Me: B-
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl): B
In the Absence: B+
Walk Run Cha-Cha: A-
St. Louis Superman: A-
It never comes as any surprise that the cumulative run time of the Documentary Shorts is always the longest among all the Oscar-nominated shorts. This year they clock in at two hours and forty minutes, beginning with this 39-minute Swedish-American film Life Overtakes Me. Ironically, I struggled to stay awake during this film about children affliced with a phenomenon called "Resignation Syndrome," in which they become totally unresponsive, as if in a coma. To be fair, my response was not entirely the film's fault; I started the presentation eating a box of Cheddar Squares crackers with pimento cheese dip, and maybe it was that that just about put me into a coma. That said, the subject being objectively compelling notwithstanding, I would still argue this story would work better in print than as a film. It certainly deserves attention, this increasingly common response to trauma among refugee children facing the stress and threat of deportation back to their dangrous home coumtries. On the upside, you can watch it on its own whenever you want, on Netflix.
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) is similarly quiet and subdued, and thus faced a challenge in waking me up, but at least the children here were not all in some version of a coma. On the contrary, this 39-minute British short filmed in Afghanistan details young girls being educated in Kabul, one of the most dangerous places in the world to be born a girl. Curiously, they are also taking lessons in skateboarding. I never quite gleaned why skateboarding, in particular, as an extracurricular activity, but it's certainly something that brings joy into what might otherwise easily be joyless lives.
In the Absence, a 28-minute film from South Korea about a horribly botched 2014 rescue effort for a sinking ferry boat which ultimately resulted in the removal of the country's president, is arguably the most exciting of the bunch. It just starts off much more promising than it ends, as the opening moments feature clips from emergency phone calls and has a real-time feel to it. There are even select clips of dashcam footage and cell phone videos which are either heartbreaking, a wonder to behold, or both. Learning the totally incompetent moves were staged just to make it look like the authorities were doing anything successfully at all, just because their president was watching, made me wonder how that nation functions at all. Then, learning that this one incident resulted in the successful removal of said president, I felt a pang of jealousy. After that, with the revelation that certain things about it were still being kept secret under new national leadership, I realized, oh right—it's never that black and white. In any case, most of this film is quite gripping, although I was mystified that it never reveals why the ship sank in the first place. Turns out that's rather complicated, but still, it would have been nice to get some sense of the cause, as opposed to just the response, as both apparently were the result of a disastrous mix of incompetence, recklessness and carelessness. A lot of people died.
Walk Run Cha-Cha, on the other hand, would qualify as the most delightful and sweet of these five documentary shorts, this one a far more uplifting twenty minutes. It follows the dancing hobby of elderly South Korean couple Chipaul and Millie Cao, who long ago escaped to Los Angeles from Communist Vietnam. We see a lot of footage of them in dancing classes, some at family gatherings, and in the end a very well-produced staging of the entire dance they've been working on. I was surprisingly moved by it, and although it likely has no real chance of winning the Oscar, as soon as I saw this, I kind of wished it did.
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl): B
In the Absence: B+
Walk Run Cha-Cha: A-
St. Louis Superman: A-
It never comes as any surprise that the cumulative run time of the Documentary Shorts is always the longest among all the Oscar-nominated shorts. This year they clock in at two hours and forty minutes, beginning with this 39-minute Swedish-American film Life Overtakes Me. Ironically, I struggled to stay awake during this film about children affliced with a phenomenon called "Resignation Syndrome," in which they become totally unresponsive, as if in a coma. To be fair, my response was not entirely the film's fault; I started the presentation eating a box of Cheddar Squares crackers with pimento cheese dip, and maybe it was that that just about put me into a coma. That said, the subject being objectively compelling notwithstanding, I would still argue this story would work better in print than as a film. It certainly deserves attention, this increasingly common response to trauma among refugee children facing the stress and threat of deportation back to their dangrous home coumtries. On the upside, you can watch it on its own whenever you want, on Netflix.
Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You're a Girl) is similarly quiet and subdued, and thus faced a challenge in waking me up, but at least the children here were not all in some version of a coma. On the contrary, this 39-minute British short filmed in Afghanistan details young girls being educated in Kabul, one of the most dangerous places in the world to be born a girl. Curiously, they are also taking lessons in skateboarding. I never quite gleaned why skateboarding, in particular, as an extracurricular activity, but it's certainly something that brings joy into what might otherwise easily be joyless lives.
In the Absence, a 28-minute film from South Korea about a horribly botched 2014 rescue effort for a sinking ferry boat which ultimately resulted in the removal of the country's president, is arguably the most exciting of the bunch. It just starts off much more promising than it ends, as the opening moments feature clips from emergency phone calls and has a real-time feel to it. There are even select clips of dashcam footage and cell phone videos which are either heartbreaking, a wonder to behold, or both. Learning the totally incompetent moves were staged just to make it look like the authorities were doing anything successfully at all, just because their president was watching, made me wonder how that nation functions at all. Then, learning that this one incident resulted in the successful removal of said president, I felt a pang of jealousy. After that, with the revelation that certain things about it were still being kept secret under new national leadership, I realized, oh right—it's never that black and white. In any case, most of this film is quite gripping, although I was mystified that it never reveals why the ship sank in the first place. Turns out that's rather complicated, but still, it would have been nice to get some sense of the cause, as opposed to just the response, as both apparently were the result of a disastrous mix of incompetence, recklessness and carelessness. A lot of people died.
Walk Run Cha-Cha, on the other hand, would qualify as the most delightful and sweet of these five documentary shorts, this one a far more uplifting twenty minutes. It follows the dancing hobby of elderly South Korean couple Chipaul and Millie Cao, who long ago escaped to Los Angeles from Communist Vietnam. We see a lot of footage of them in dancing classes, some at family gatherings, and in the end a very well-produced staging of the entire dance they've been working on. I was surprisingly moved by it, and although it likely has no real chance of winning the Oscar, as soon as I saw this, I kind of wished it did.
But then I saw St. Louis Superman, a 28-minute film about 34-year-old Missouri State Representative Bruce Franks Jr., which is unfortunately the only one of these short documentaries that cannot currently be found in full online. This man, also a Ferguson activist whose own brother was killed in crossfire at the age of nine, as well as a battle rapper, is an inspiration, and once I finished watching this one, I decided this is the one that really deserves the win. Apparently a piling on of related challenges regarding violence in his community, and its effect on his mental health, resulted in Franks choosing to resign, but that should not discount the achievements he had while in office, which are impressive of any junior representative, let alone one with the specific challenges he faced. We can only hope this man can one day return to politics and help change this country for the better, which this film movingly depicts him doing from the start.
Overall: B+