 |
| Last Day of Freedom is among this year's Academy Award nominees for Best Documentary Short. |
Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the
Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check
back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.
Best Documentary Short
The nominees are:
Body Team 12
Chau, beyond the lines
Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah
A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness
Last Day of Freedom
There has been talk in social media circles and elsewhere
that this may be the dourest lineup ever assembled for this category. Put
briefly, these five short films range in topic from the Ebola virus in Liberia,
Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, and the Holocaust to honor killings in
Pakistan and the death penalty in California. On the surface, no, this group
does not exactly give off positive vibes, but if we are honest, this category
is usually home to unimaginable horrors and tragedies beyond belief. So, in
that context, this year is about par for the course.
The simple reason is that in the 40 minutes or less that
these films run, emotional resonance counts for a lot, and nothing gets the
heart pumping like death and injustice, which all of these have in spades.
However, it would be a mistake to think of this as just a grim pageant of
despair, though it also is that. Rather, each of these movies – with one
exception that we will get to in a moment – has something vital to say about
the world in which we live and how we treat the people with whom we share this
world.
It is a cliché, but yes, the Academy is inclined to vote for
Holocaust films. When you remember that a majority of Academy members were born
during or right after World War II, many of them into families directly affected
by the war, that tendency is understandable. Beyond that general assessment, it
is a little hard to pin down a pattern in this category through the years. If a
film covers an important topic with an intimate story that tugs at the heart
strings, that film has the makeup of a winner. Our likely frontrunner this year
does not quite cover those bases, but it is about the Holocaust.
Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah – For those unaware, Shoah is a 10-hour documentary about the
Holocaust directed by Claude Lanzmann. It is a masterpiece of filmmaking and
considered by most to be the definitive record of the Holocaust. Lanzmann began
work on the film in 1973 and was not finished until 12 years later. He traveled
across the globe, put himself directly in harm’s way, endured intense emotional
trauma, and came away with a grand statement on the depths of human suffering
and the capacity for evil demonstrated by the Holocaust.
The making of Shoah
is a remarkable story, but the 40-minute runtime of director Adam Benzine’s Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah
is not nearly enough time to tell it. Benzine essentially collects a
greatest-hits package of Lanzmann telling stories from the production, using
specific moments from Shoah to lead
Lanzmann into a memory. Lanzmann, a gifted storyteller not known for his
brevity, has time for about four or five memories. Knowing it took 12 years to
make a 10-hour movie, four or five recollections from the production just do
not cut it.
Still, as we discussed yesterday with the feature
documentaries, the Academy loves films about artists, and that is doubly true
of films about filmmakers. Lanzmann is not widely liked – as mentioned in the
film, he is prickly, stubborn, and just generally difficult – but he is highly
respected. Though he is not a nominee, awarding this film about Lanzmann’s work
could be a way for the Academy to honor Lanzmann himself, who has never been
recognized with either an Oscar win or a nomination.
Last Day of Freedom – First-time filmmakers Dee Hibbert-Jones
and Nomi Talisman immediately distinguish their film by choosing to present it
entirely in hand-drawn animation. It is not unheard of to blend documentary and
animation, and among the benefits of the shift in medium is that it allows the
filmmakers to depict scenes they otherwise never could. In Last Day of Freedom, Hibbert-Jones and Talisman match of the vividness
of their interview subject’s tragic tale with the vibrancy of their animation
style, drawing viewers deeper into the narrative than traditional storytelling
techniques might.
Last Day of Freedom
tells of Manny Babbitt, a mentally ill Vietnam War veteran whom a failed
justice system executed for murder. There is no question of whether Babbitt committed
the crime, but because of his personal history, his level of culpability is
suspect at best. As interview subject Bill Babbitt, Manny’s brother,
identifies: In an election year for the district attorney, blood demands blood.
At no point did Manny Babbitt receive fair or just treatment under the law with
an incompetent attorney, an overreaching, politically minded DA, and an
all-white jury.
The tragedy of the film – beyond the obvious miscarriages of
justice – is in listening to Bill Babbitt tell the tale of his brother’s life.
The animation allows us to see this tale in full as we watch the two men dig
for clams at the beach or play football together as children. Hibbert-Jones and
Talisman bring Manny Babbitt back to life through their drawings, and though we
cannot undo the harm that has been done, the film makes it clear we have a moral
responsibility to prevent further harm in this world.
Chau, beyond the lines – Director Courtney Marsh started out
with the intention of making one film – a disturbing chronicle of daily life in
a Vietnamese hospital for children with disabilities caused by exposure to
Agent Orange – yet over the course of eight years, she allowed her film to
transform into a stirring portrait of defiance and triumph. The nurses
interviewed in the film refer to the hospital as a camp, which gives the
impression of a sort of summer day school, but as the film’s primary subject,
Chau, later identifies, it is closer to a prison where the disabled are held in
isolation.
Chau is told by the nurses his dream of becoming an artist
and clothing designer is unattainable and a waste of everyone’s time. We learn
early on that children can be voted out of the hospital by nurses who no longer
want to deal with them, and Chau treads dangerously close to that line. So,
rather than be told to leave, he takes off on his own, first staying with his
parents, who steal his disability checks, then by himself in the city.
Though his struggles with finding a job and fending for
himself are all-consuming, he returns to his dream of creating art and begins
turning out beautiful paintings by holding the brush in his mouth. It is only
by Marsh’s dedication to the process, visiting Chau over eight years, that the
film undergoes a transformation from one about victimization to one about
accomplishment.
A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness – There is no
such triumph or victory in director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s A Girl in the River. There is only pain,
misery, and endless oppression. Saba is a 19-year-old girl who marries the man
she loves, though her family has forbidden it. For supposedly bringing shame
upon her family, Saba is taken to the river by her father and uncle, shot in
the head, bagged, and thrown in the water. She miraculously survives the attack
and sets out to find justice, but in Pakistan, where we are told 1,000 girls a
year are murdered in so-called “honor killings,” justice may not be achievable.
Obaid-Chinoy is a previous Oscar winner in this category for
co-directing Saving Face, which
follows along similar thematic lines but concerns victims of acid attacks in
Pakistan. However, where that film was a record of hope and shined a light
forward, A Girl in the River is
despairingly bleak. Saba becomes a victim all over again as local custom
demands she forgive her attackers so they can be set free without punishment
and so that ill will among neighbors can be avoided. It is an entire culture
built on the subjugation of women and the privileging of “honor” over humanity.
Body Team 12 – The shortest and consequently least satisfying among
this year’s nominees, director David Darg’s Body
Team 12 shows the Ebola crisis in Liberia through the eyes of a woman
tasked with removing the dead bodies of Ebola victims from homes. Running just
13 minutes, much of the footage shown in the film is of the process of
preparing to remove a body, the removal, and the cleanup afterward – truly, you
have never seen so many shots of someone putting on goggles.
Speaking over most of this footage is Garmai Sumo, the only
female member of the body team, who takes great pride in the work she is doing
for her country. She sees it as her patriotic duty to help stop the spread of
the Ebola virus. In fulfilling this duty, she puts herself and her family at
great risk and loses most of her friends to fear of contracting the virus. Sumo
is intelligent, talented, and philosophical, and one wishes we only had more
time to spend with her.
The final analysis
Any of these could win and it would not be surprising. As is so often the case with the shorts categories, the winner comes down to who has seen the films. Urgency of topic and emotional impact often show the way, but at least four of these films concern issues we continue to deal with in our society, and they all tread in similar emotional waters with questions about human decency and moral obligation. No one film stands out as necessarily more deserving than the others, so this is a best-guess scenario, and my best guess is Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, though I would add A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness is a strong second possibility.
Will win: Claude
Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah
Should win: Last
Day of Freedom
Tomorrow: Best Foreign
Language Film
No comments:
Post a Comment