Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary Short

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Documentary Short

The nominees are:

The Elephant Whisperers

Haulout

How Do You Measure a Year?

The Martha Mitchell Effect

Stranger at the Gate

Maybe it’s not fair, but I have long associated this category with a despair that beggars belief. I think it goes back to 2015, when the five nominated films covered, in no particular order: Ebola virus, Agent Orange victims, the Holocaust, racism in the criminal justice system, and honor killings in Pakistan. Each was well made and powerful, but it was a brutal 2 ½ hours at the movies. Anyway, it has been a joke between my wife and I that if we’re going to see the nominated doc shorts, someone better bring tissues.

Imagine our surprise, then, when this year’s crop of nominees failed to rip our hearts out and stomp on them. Instead, we got a batch of solid, intelligent movies that cover a wide range of important subjects with style and insight. I am not saying I have a problem with unrelenting sadness at the movies – quite the contrary; those are my favorite kinds of films – but at least for one season, this eclectic group offers a breath of fresh air for the category.

The Elephant Whisperers – That said, just because these films aren’t inherently dark and tragic doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be ready to shed a few tears. Case in point, Kartiki Gonsalves’ film about an Indian couple that finds love while caring for orphaned baby elephants is a shot straight to the heart. Bomman and Belli work at a national park in southern India, and their special gift is the ability to raise baby elephants, who generally die when separated from their families.

We meet two adorable baby elephants during the film’s 39-minute runtime, and it would take a heart of stone not to fall instantly in love with both. They are truly miraculous. But, Gonsalves has more on her mind than cute baby animals. She explores the root cause of their abandonment – human encroachment on wild land – and the depth of emotions these creatures are capable of experiencing. They are more like us than they are not, and Gonsalves argues that if more of us realized that, maybe we wouldn’t treat them so shabbily.

Stranger at the Gate – I had mixed feelings about this film. On the one hand, director Joshua Seftel expertly uses the tricks and tropes of the documentary form to set the audience up for one story, then pulls the rug out from under us at the last minute. Seftel’s mastery of the narrative structure he is exploiting is quite a sight to behold. However, all of that formal trickery is ill-suited to the actual story of the film and ends up feeling more manipulative than imaginative.

The film is an exploration of the life and motives of former US Marine turned wannabe domestic terrorist Richard McKinney. Seftel interviews McKinney, his ex-wife, and step-daughter, as well as a number of members of the Islamic community center he planned to bomb. I’ll let the movie hang on to its surprises, but suffice it to say that by the time Seftel pulls his magic trick toward the end, he had already lost me. Not what you’re hoping for as a filmmaker trying to get across a message of peace, understanding, and forgiveness.

The Martha Mitchell Effect – The Martha Mitchell effect, the condition after which this film is named, refers to an instance in which a medical professional diagnoses someone as delusional despite that person’s fears being accurate and true. In the common vernacular, it’s gaslighting, or: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. If you watched the recent Julia Roberts miniseries, Gaslit, in which Roberts plays Martha Mitchell, you understand the origin of the term.

If you didn’t watch it – no shame intended; I didn’t either – Anne Alvergue’s and Debra McClutchy’s film covers the same territory in a scant 40 minutes. Martha Mitchell was the wife of US Attorney General John Mitchell during the Nixon Administration and was one of the early whistleblowers around the Watergate Scandal. The administration attempted to silence and discredit her, but she persevered to see Richard Nixon resign the presidency. The film does an excellent job of establishing Martha as a person outside of Watergate before touching on the scandal. It is fascinating, informative, and not just a little funny.

How Do You Measure a Year? – Experimental documentary filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt was nominated in this category last year for When We Were Bullies, a reflection on a bullying incident in which the director was involved when he was in the fifth grade. This time, he turns the camera on his own child for a fascinating consideration of what it is like to grow up and where all that time goes when children age. Starting when she turned 2, Rosenblatt filmed his daughter, Ella, answering the same set of questions every year on her birthday.

We watch Ella grow and change from a precocious toddler to a shy adolescent to a depressed teen to a mature young woman on the verge of adulthood. Rosenblatt never goes backward, nor does he ever take us out of the film to reflect on anything he presents. In this way, he emphasizes the slow march of time and the ways we can never get that time back. Ella will never be 2 years old again. She will never again be the 9-year-old belting out songs from Rent. But no matter how old she gets, she will always be connected to her family, and that, in the end, seems to be the point.

Haulout – My favorite of the bunch is also probably the least likely to win, though it has received accolades from a number of international film festivals where it has played, so all hope is not lost. This quietly haunting nature doc comes from brother and sister duo Maxim Arbugaev and Evgenia Arbugaeva, who lived with marine biologist Maxim Chakilev for three months as he observed the annual walrus migration at Cape Heart-Stone on the far northeastern tip of Russia. The first time the walruses surround the hut in which the trio lives, it is one of the strangest and most striking images in any movie this year. 

The walruses stop at this beach to take a break during their migration. Each year, fewer walruses survive the journey because as oceanic ice flows melt, there are fewer places for the walruses to rest on their trip. Many die from exhaustion. In 2020, the year this was filmed, record-high temperatures led to a record-high number of walrus deaths. The camera observes Chakilev as he tallies the dead. It is profoundly sad and serves as irrefutable evidence of our warming climate’s effect on the natural world, even in places we rarely see.

The final analysis

Netflix has had at least one nominee in this category in each of the past seven years, fielding two winners (The White Helmets in 2016 and Period. End of Sentence. in 2018). Last year, the streaming giant had three of the five nominated doc shorts, though all lost to the New York Times-produced The Queen of Basketball. This year, what I would call the two frontrunners both come from Netflix: The Elephant Whisperers and The Martha Mitchell Effect. 

Between the two, I would give the edge to The Elephant Whisperers, which has the benefit of a sweet, compelling love story between its two main human subjects, in addition to the beautiful elephant footage. A spoiler could come in the form of Stranger at the Gate, which has the whiff of political relevance, and voters may take to the central story arc, which I found questionable but some may find inspirational. For now, I’m sticking with my gut.

Will win: The Elephant Whisperers

Should win: Haulout

Should have been here: The Flagmakers

A note about my favorite snub: I had a chance to catch The Flagmakers, from directors Cynthia Wade and Sharon Liese, as part of a free National Geographic film series at the American Cinematheque. I found it a stirring dissection of what a symbol like the US flag can mean to the immigrants tasked with manufacturing it. Never shying away from difficult questions and hard truths about this nation, the film would have been a more than worthy inclusion on this list.

Next time: Documentary Feature