Rowan Sullivan

By Rowan Sullivan & Sebastian Torrelio

If you’re short on time and still want to have something to say at next weekend’s Academy Awards, these 15 short films are a great place to start. There’s controversy, style and plenty of emotion amongst these 15 shorts and only 311 total minutes (less than most Lav Diaz films). Plus the 2021 Oscar shorts are all available to watch in cinemas near you.

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The Animated 2021 Oscar Shorts

BURROW (USA)

Burrow follows the typical format of American animated animal stories: foolhardy animal with a foolhardy human’s personality tries to overcome her own odds in pursuit of her dreams, despite whatever setbacks she may find. The little rabbit at front and center digs and digs to aimless procedure, into more of a physical hole than a metaphorical one – though inevitably, both.

What puts Sharafian’s cute fable over the top is its reliability on the audience’s relationship to the topline rabbit. Burrow is as much about anxiety and inadequacy as it is about the art of friendship, an introspective short that recalls Pixar’s dramatic ventures while sticking to what Sharafian knows best (her past work in storytelling hailing primarily from Cartoon Network’s “We Bare Bears”). Burrow is the coziest, warmest short nominated for this year’s Oscar, a 2-D feat for a studio more traditionally known for never having ventured this positively into the older medium. It has already spent the better part of its Disney+ reign inspiring viewers for the possibilities at Pixar’s hands with such work now under their belts. – ST

GENIUS LOCI (FRANCE)

In Latin, “the atmosphere of a place.” Genius Loci lands, among many places, between the night eyes of a colorscape city and the point-of-view of Reine, a girl with a chaotic mind gone untempered. Reine balances between the amplification of her own confusion and the sprawling mass of the metropolitan before her, causing her to make brash decisions. It’s only at the presence of others—her friend, her sister, the world at her feet—that she finds the easing, natural presence she needs.

There is always one Animated short contender a year that visually bends the artform to their will, with nothing short of psychedelic results. Genius Loci holds the mantle while sporting a use of color that can’t be described as anything other than conceptually modernist – a heavily fluid work that sports a boundless world, drifting between characters with a vast, underlying metaphor as a guide. If it sounds abstract and confusing, that’s because it is. But Genius Loci lands Merigeau a well-deserved nomination for a claimed seven years of translation work from page to screen, in part due to the limitless of his perception. – ST

IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU (USA)

Unveiling as a story of reminiscence, If Anything Happens I Love You depicts the tragedy confronting the parents of a young girl at the most soul-crushing moment of a couple’s life conceivable, in the time following their daughter’s death at the hands of a school shooter. Bending through memories and hostile moments of plea and recreation alike, the mother and father cope with their united grief amid only the lightest strokes of color remaining in their lives.

McCormack, hot off the heels of his work on Toy Story 4, paints an extremely coarse picture of romance and love alongside Govier, the more traditional scriptwriter of the two. The most stunning physical aspects of If Anything Happens I Love You lend themselves to how rough the emotional beats of its arc are laid out – the briefest moments of color supply plentifully to an audience that is surely already overwhelmed by the density of the subject matter. But to where most American animation productions could find cheesier imagery to depict the broken emptiness of loss, If Anything Happens I Love You relies on a hand-drawn sparsity to land its devastation. If it wins the Oscar, a lot will attribute the ploying musical layer (King Princess’ “1950”), but McCormack & Govier’s short leaves a lot of testament to the empathy of its experience where most filmmakers would find an easier, more traditional route. – ST

OPERA (SOUTH KOREA/USA)

The closest work nominated under any category at this year’s Oscars comes to ‘living art,’ Opera is an abstract story of the history of modern civilization told in the perspective of, as voters will see it, a nine-minute, 2-D presentation. Cyclical in nature, Opera takes its viewer downward without narration, through the pillars of a formative society as anonymous stick figures take themselves to task, school, prayer, community involvement, and finally war.

Opera is one of the world’s most complicated pitches for an art installation, a pyramid-shaped diagram of diagram of action integrated within action, leaving the viewer to interpret the greater symbolism behind what any of it could mean – whether it be a more blunt, religious deity controlling the ides of time, or the more cryptic layers that suggest different details on caste systems, slavery and the language of political gain. Opera got its nomination through the hypnotic consistency of its animation, a full story of human trial and execution told in a bite-sized chunk. It’s the kind of artwork that could be stared at for hours on end, questioned about its integrity and morality while also serving as an introspective way of therapizing one’s own social behavior. It should not be unnoticed, however, how deeply alive the conceptual art of this showcase is, and how much imagination it takes to tell an epic tale of gods among man in such fresh, whimsical details. – ST

YES-PEOPLE (ICELAND)

In the community of an apartment building, six individuals go about their everyday lives with the most minimal degree of communication, the titular, “Yes.” Over time, their lack of language punishes them by robbing them of their sense of fraternity, leading every day into the next with a task-list, the struggle of staying alive, and the chores of inhabiting space with one another without any found value in the traditional relationship.

In a year where the primary themes of human livelihood have shaped into things that can exclusively be done on one’s own, Yes-People may have some credence in the sitcom-like amusement of watching a myriad of individuals putter and murmur around their confined rooms, acknowledging how strangely dystopian a pandemic situation has made the world’s own motivations for keeping a neighborly face. Still, Yes-People doesn’t do anything more interesting or captivating than silent European animation (a lot of English stop motion coming to mind) does with even less words. A clever conceit for some genre or set piece that would normally sustain a narrative structure, Yes-People fails to even find too much comedic presentation when translated out to US audiences, and will likely only land affirmatively to Oscar voters who look to this batch of shorts for more kooky aimlessness than emotional specificity. – ST

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The Documentary 2021 Oscar shorts

COLETTE (USA)

Ninety-year old Colette Marin-Catherine is one of the last surviving members of the French Resistance. As a young girl, she belonged to a family of Resistance fighters that included her 17-year old brother Jean-Pierre. The last time Colette saw Jean-Pierre was in 1943, when he was arrested by the Gestapo and “disappeared” into the Nazi concentration camp system, never to be seen by his family again. The family was inwardly shattered, but outwardly stoic. No tears were permitted.

It’s no surprise that this short documentary nominated for the Academy Awards is an emotional short film. It’s also no surprise that the film takes Colette from her resolute stoic, unemotional self that rejects empathy to an emotional wreck. The journey is facilitated by a young history student that takes Colette to Germany for the first time to visit the concentration camps. Whilst the young student offers a comforting inter-generational friendship, her main role is to help unlock Colette’s hidden emotions. It’s a process that feels similar to that in The Look of Silence, in which the subjects are forced to relive their War experiences for the camera. However, unlike The Look of Silence in which there’s some satisfaction in watching the perpetrators of genocide break down, capturing Colette’s long overdue tears feels intrusive and exploitative. – RS

A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION (USA)

A Concerto is a Conversation is perfect for the Los Angeles Academy Awards voting crowd. It tells the story of virtuoso jazz pianist and film composer Kris Bowers as he tracks his family’s lineage through his 91 year-old grandfather from Jim Crow Florida to a ‘free’ Los Angeles. The ‘City of Dreams’ is portrayed as exactly that – a city in which one black man had the opportunity to live his American dream after escaping racism in the South. His success story (establishing a successful dry-cleaning company) is completed in his grandson’s transition to high society as the film ends with him performing at Los Angeles’ iconic Walt Disney Hall.

The cinematography of the film feels overtly warm and personal. In one-on-one interviews, Kris looks directly into the camera whilst his grandfather humbly responds to him with his endearing expressions captured in close up. The warm colors of their conversation contrast with the coldness of the black and white footage from the past. There’s even a playfulness in a few shots that makes this film feel like a celebration. It feels like they’ve made it. That Kris’ present day opportunities are thanks to his Grandfather’s determination and hard work. However, their American dream also glosses over the hardships of many others. Los Angeles is presented as a safe haven where African-Americans escaping from the Jim Crow South could find refuge and success whilst racism is equated with the South. Kris and his Grandfather’s story, whilst heartwarming, feels too good to be true. – RS

DO NOT SPLIT (USA/NORWAY)

Told from within the heart of the Hong Kong protests, Do Not Split begins in 2019 as a proposed bill allowing the Chinese government to extradite criminal suspects to mainland China escalated protests throughout Hong Kong. Unfolding across a year, Do Not Split brings the footage of the Hong Kong protests first documented in films like Lessons in Dissent (2014), Lost in the Fumes (2017) and Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower (2017) up to 2020.

In comparison to these earlier documentaries, the footage captured in this film makes the protests feel more desperate. Decked out in gas masks and gloves, the protestors have more experience and equipment than before, but so do the police. And whilst the protestors retaliation is targeted, the police violence spills over onto anyone in the vicinity, involved in the protests or not (including a young Mexican tourist). It’s interesting to see how the protests have evolved to find hints at how the protests in the U.S. may change. A pro China flash mob that hurls abuse at protestors hints at some of the more insidious government attempts to antagonize and fight the protestors. Despite the resoluteness of the protestors at the start of the short, the arrival of the pandemic allows more stringent lockdown measures signaling that the inevitable end is near. – RS

HUNGER WARD (USA)

Filmed inside two of the most active therapeutic feeding centers in conflict-ridden Yemen, Hunger Ward documents two women fighting to thwart the spread of starvation against the backdrop of a forgotten war.

Any initial hopes that this would be an uplifting against the odds story like last year’s Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) are quickly extinguished when we first see the kids entering this hospital ward. Their young eyes contain lives already lived and their unnaturally thin malnourished bodies evoke images of the starved concentration camp survivors from WW2. There isn’t much hope either. We witness the two brave doctors do everything they can to save a few of their patients, to no avail. The only positive, if it can be called that, is that Hunger Ward shows the critical Yemeni humanitarian crisis to a wider audience that may, with a bit of luck, have a small amount of influence in affecting the U.S. stance that sustains it. – RS

A LOVE SONG FOR LATASHA (USA)

The injustice surrounding the shooting death of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins at a South Central Los Angeles store became a flashpoint for the city’s 1992 civil uprising. As the Black community expressed its profound pain in the streets, Latasha’s friends and family privately mourned the loss of a vibrant child whose full story was never in the headlines. Nearly three decades later, director Sophia Nahli Allison’s A Love Song for Latasha removes the protests from the context of her death and rebuilds an archive of a promising life lost.

A Love Song for Latasha is by far the most original of this year’s nominated documentary shorts. It’s also the only one, bar a few moments in A Concerto is a Conversation, that isn’t captured purely mimetically. The images in this film are used to emotionally support the narrator’s voice rather than directly show what’s happening. The images depict the neighborhood Latasha grew up in what looks like Super-8 footage to make it appear a bit dated and homely, as the narrators talk through some of their favorite memories with Latasha. The most powerful moment comes when her friend tells us when she learned about Latasha’s death. The images fade to darkness as a few minimalist animated brush strokes splash across the screen in rhythm with the narrators voice crumbling with emotion. It’s the scene with the most emotion of all the documentary shorts and also the only moment which doesn’t contain any documentary footage. – RS

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The Live Action 2021 Oscar Shorts

FEELING THROUGH (USA)

Tereek (Steven Prescod) wanders alone down a New York street, seemingly aimless in his path, when he encounters a face in need. Artie (Robert Tarango), a disabled man riddled deaf and blind, is similarly out of his own way and seeks assistance getting to where he needs to be. Tereek doesn’t know such calmness, only wanting to find some safety and security in the bustling cityscape, but finds comfort in his own outward willingness to bear what life throws his way.

The most notable aspect of Feeling Through is its advertised casting, Tarango as the ‘first DeafBlind lead in a motion picture.’ Make of that what you will, it’s hard to imagine Feeling Through will gather much more of a viewing audience than what it already has, a campaign driven by the short’s projection for free on YouTube over the recent months. But even then, Feeling Through doesn’t uniquely campaign as a signal for disability – it paved its way to the red carpet with a deeply magnetic sweetness, a sentimental story of the camaraderie that binds us together even when the world seems antagonistically cynical. Prescod especially nails his role, giving his all into an undeniable simplicity that lands at the most perfect moment of human ‘togetherness’ an Oscar nom could ask for. – ST

THE LETTER ROOM (USA)

Coming hot into the ceremony of Oscars, Oscar Isaac leads The Letter Room as corrections officer Richard, a recently transferred soul amongst the souls, taking in the observations of his surrounding jail system like, well, a man with little else to distract himself with. He sounds finds more curiosity in his daily habits, becoming enmeshed in the personal letters and lives being sent in by a deeply affected young woman (Alia Shawkat).

By nature of its star pedigree alone, The Letter Room is the most high profile of this year’s live action crop. Isaac seems almost too perfectly suited for these sorts of roles – gruff exterior with a hidden animosity, foreign-language speaking with an extremely well-timed sense of comedic expression when the visual punchline lands. Alongside his riches, The Letter Room tries to bat around one or two too many ideas – among its undiscerning coverage includes the nature of human connection, reform of the American prison system, how we choose to fabricate ourselves under the veil of distance. Elvira Lind’s film gets a lot of its attention more or less deserved despite this, providing one of the more entertaining steps in getting voters through this year’s grief-filled shorts ballot, without ever swaying too far from the ‘united we stand’ of the current times. – ST

WHITE EYE (ISRAEL)

On a calm night in Tel Aviv, native Israeli Omer (Daniel Gad) spots what he believes to be his recently stolen bicycle locked outside of a small industrial building. He begins to retrieve his bike, figuring his best to saw off the lock, when Yunes (Dawti Tekelaeb) overhears him. A black immigrant, Yunes confronts Omer in a defensive manner, claiming that he bought the bicycle himself, though noticeably not wanting to get into a larger confrontation.

It’s a wonder how this spin on the general ideas of Bicycle Thieves didn’t wander onto the Oscar stage sooner. Ayn Levana’s White Eye concerns the tone that imperialism and its tendencies have swept throughout his home country of Israel, and how citizens more often than not turn a blind eye to the loss of humanity being cast out from under their feet. Shot in one seemingly continuous take, White Eye takes a very complicated, deeply conscious message and renders it simplistic, an easy-to-follow story about racial bias laid on the grounding infrastructure of how the working class keeps to their livelihood. This writer’s personal favorite of this year’s nominated live action catalog, a dynamic and beautifully-filmed piece on the ambiguous value of our fellow man, and stands out with a bleak intelligence within a crowd that never reaches the same standard of poignant authenticity. – ST

THE PRESENT (PALESTINE)

On his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his young daughter set out in the West Bank to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy would it be to go shopping?

Not easy is the obvious response. Yusef has to pass Israeli checkpoints every time he goes out and this time there are problems. He’s forced to wait in a holding cell at the border whilst the officers presumably check his identification. The frustration and injustice is amplified by the presence of his daughter who has to sit and wait whilst all this is happening. The added drama of her wetting herself and leaving her coat behind pushes the boundaries of melodramatic manipulation. The clear difference between the Israeli and Palestinian characters (friendly vs. hostile) also leaves no room for interpretation in what is an emotionally manipulative criticism of the Israeli occupation.

TWO DISTANT STRANGERS (USA)

In Two Distant Strangers, graphic designer Carter James’ repeated attempts to get home to his dog are thwarted by a recurring deadly encounter that forces him to re-live the same awful day over and over again.

That awful day is getting killed by a cop. Not just in one way, but in the multiple ways cops have already killed innocent black men and women. Here’s a list of my thoughts when watching this film:

• It’s Joey Bada$$
• There’s robot dog treat dispensers with cameras?
• [Pulling out a shiny cigarette case from his backpack] please don’t create this into a moment where a policeman kills him
• Wow. They really have him shouting “I can’t breathe” whilst being choked by a cop. A strange tribute.
• It’s a bad dream? No wait it’s a time loop.
• Let’s re-enact some other infamous ways cops have killed black people recently?
• Using the names of victims to give this credibility
• Surely not… no… his blood really pooled in the shape of Africa

It’s uncomfortable watching all the references to the different ways black people have been murdered by cops in such a light-hearted and care-free fashion. What might have been good intentions just comes across like a horrifically insensitive ‘Pepsi commercial’ tribute to all the black people murdered by police.