Movie Review
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Oscar Nominated Shorts 2016: Live Action
Directed by Jamie Donoughue, Patrick Vollrath, Basil Khalil, Henry Hughes, and Benjamin Cleary.
At Kendall Square. 107 minutes. Unrated (as R: nothing offensive, but some things are disturbing)
In German, Arabic, Hebrew, French, Serbian, and Albanian, with subtitles.
Short doesn’t mean easy. Condensing a story into its essence requires craftsmanship and discipline. The films nominated for the best live-action short Oscar take on that unforgiving format, sometimes with devastating effectiveness.
So it is with “Shok,’’ by British filmmaker Jamie Donoughue. In Kosovo, a man finds an old bike left in the middle of the road. He rides it and it takes him via a flashback to when he was a chubby Albanian boy in his occupied town doing errands for the Serbian invaders. He enlists his best friend, who has a bicycle, into helping him. “You can’t trust them,’’ his friend says, as he reluctantly complies. Now grown up, the one-time collaborator relives the shocking outcome of his folly.
In German filmmaker Patrick Vollrath’s “Everything Will Be Okay,’’ a divorced father picks up his daughter for an afternoon visit. The girl is overjoyed by gifts and a trip to the fair. But she senses that something is wrong. Where this story is going is not hard to guess, but that doesn’t make it any less heartbreaking.
The premise of Palestinian director Basil Khalil’s “Ave Maria’’ sounds like the setup of a joke. A family of Orthodox Israeli settlers take a shortcut through the West Bank, smash their car into a statue of the Virgin Mary, and seek help from nuns who’ve taken a vow of silence. Funny, but its satire of religious absurdities is cutting.
In “Stutterer,’’ Irish filmmaker Benjamin Cleary takes his slight story — a stutterer must meet a girl he’s only communicated with online — and fills it with texture, detail, and wit. Only in US director Henry Hughes’s “Day One’’ do the restrictions of the short film break down. It’s the first day on duty for an Arab-American woman serving as an Army interpreter in a war zone, and a busy day it is; her challenges range from dodging an IED to helping a terrorist’s wife give birth. For a film this busy, only a feature length will do.
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
