Movie Review
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Oscar Nominated Shorts 2016: Documentary
Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, and David Darg (program A); Courtney Marsh and Adam Benzine (program B). At Coolidge Corner. 87 minutes (program A), 77 minutes (program B). Unrated (infuriating inhumanity and injustice with little consolation). In Panjabi, Vietnamese, German, and French, with subtitles.
This year’s Oscar nominees for best documentary short don’t shrink from brutal truths in their tales of injustice and suffering.
Perhaps the best and most infuriating of the films is Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness.’’ Like Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl shot by the Taliban for upholding a woman’s right to an education, the 18-year-old subject of Obaid-Chinoy’s film was targeted for breaking the rules. One of the few to survive the thousand annual “honor killings’’ that occur in Pakistan, she escaped after her father and uncle shot her in the face and dumped her in a river. Her crime was marrying without their permission; their crime was committed with impunity.
Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman’s “Last Day of Freedom’’ also examines the conflict between family and justice. In 1999, California executed Manny Babbitt for homicide. A Vietnam veteran who served two tours of duty and suffered PTSD, he killed an elderly woman in 1980 while intoxicated and having flashbacks. Manny’s brother Bill turned him in, reassured by the arresting officers that Manny would not face the death penalty. Still anguished, he relates the story, which is rendered in graceful animation, intensifying the pathos and outrage.
Courtney Marsh’s “Chau, Beyond the Lines’’ profiles another victim of the Vietnam War. Teenager Le Minh Chau was born with deformed arms and legs because his mother was exposed to Agent Orange. He dreams of becoming an artist. By the end of the film, painting with a brush between his teeth, he seems poised for success.
That’s the closest thing to a happy ending in this collection. In David Darg’s “Body Team 12,’’ courageous, compassionate aid workers collect the dead during the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and take them to a mass cremation. They can’t even offer the survivors the consolation of a gravesite to mourn their loved ones. And in Adam Benzine’s “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah,’’ the filmmaker of the title recalls the traumas and challenges experienced during the 12 years it took to make “Shoah’’ (1985), the 10-hour-long, consummate documentary about the Holocaust. “When I was finished,’’ he recalls, “it was like a bereavement.’’
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OSCAR NOMINATED SHORTS 2016: Documentary
Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman, and David Darg (program A); Courtney Marsh and Adam Benzine (program B). At Coolidge Corner. 87 minutes (program A), 77 minutes (program B). Unrated (infuriating inhumanity and injustice with little consolation). In Panjabi, Vietnamese, German, and French, with subtitles.
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
