The 2019 Oscar Shorts: Good things in small packages

The 2019 Oscar Shorts (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Not rated, and perhaps too intense for young viewers
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.31.20

A droll familial theme runs through last year’s Academy Award-nominated short subjects: Two of the animated entries are titled Daughter and Sister, while two live-action entries are titled Brotherhood and A Sister.

Can even a doting father survive an encounter with his daughter's
impossible hair?

Family also is key to Hair Love and The Neighbor’s Window, which makes one wonder if this is design, rather than coincidence.

And while numerous entries involve solemn or even grim topics — no doubt reflecting the increasingly agitated state of real world events — the collective package is by no means a slog through wrist-slashing despair, as was the case last year. For which we can be grateful.

The live-action entries kick off with Belgian director Delphine Girard’s suspenseful Une soeur (A Sister), which begins placidly, as a couple takes a late-night drive; Alie (Selma Alaoui) chats on her cell phone, discussing child-care details with her sister. The tableau seems innocuous … until Girard shifts to an emergency call center, where an operator (Veerle Baetens) takes a call, and the same conversation repeats.

And we suddenly realize that Alie isn’t chatting capriciously; she’s in real trouble — the driver (Guillaume Duhesme) is no friend — and trying desperately, cleverly, to get help. Tension builds as the sharp-witted operator, deducing the scenario, adjusts on the fly; the camera mostly holds on Baetens, who does a terrific job. The guy in the car grows increasingly suspicious as the “conversation” continues, until…

Saria, a brutal slice of recent history, comes from Bryan Buckley, who also was nominated in this category for 2012’s Asad, a coming-of-age fable about a Somali boy struggling to survive in his war-torn land.

Inspired by an actual 2017 event, Buckley’s new film focuses on Saria (Estefanía Tellez) and Ximena (Gabriela Ramírez), two orphaned sisters who — along with scores of other young girls — endure daily abuse and hardship as “residents” of Guatemala’s Virgen de La Asuncion Safe Home (a designation that is beyond ironic). The food is awful, the girls are worked mercilessly, and constantly demeaned by a guard (Imelda Castro) who can’t be bothered with names, and refers to them solely as “little bitches.”

Occasional gatherings with orphaned boys allow brief respites … but can young romance blossom amid such harsh surroundings?

Brotherhood, this category’s likely winner, is a Canada-Tunisia-Qatar-Sweden co-production helmed by Meryam Joobeur. Mohamed (Mohamed Grayaâ), a devout and hardened shepherd, ekes out a meager existence alongside his wife and their two young sons. The dynamic shifts abruptly when the family’s estranged eldest son, Malek (Malek Mechergui), returns from Syria after having served as a foreign fighter for ISIS.

He’s accompanied by a new wife, her features almost completely concealed beneath a burqa. The tension is palpable; Mohamed clearly disapproves, despite Malek’s effort to re-integrate with his family. 

The story progresses with very little dialog, much of the drama unfolding via gestures and expressions captured deftly by cinematographer Vincent Gonneville. The most striking detail is that all three boys — actual brothers, and first-time actors — are freckled and red-haired, which seems bizarrely out of place in these surroundings. Joobeur’s approach is quietly unsettling, and we anticipate nothing good.

American director Marshall Curry’s The Neighbor’s Window, in great contrast, is an inconsequential trifle that doesn’t belong alongside its far better nominees. Alli (Maria Dizzia) and Jacob (Greg Keller), big-city parents increasingly harried by their expanding family, are mildly shocked when two free-spirited twentysomethings move into a similar high-rise apartment across the street … and engage in all manner of sexual activity without bothering to draw the curtains.

Despite feeling like voyeurs, Alli and Jacob can’t help watching, as days, weeks and months pass. Although Dizzia attempts to convey the weary ennui of Alli’s life, Curry can’t sustain interest over his film’s 20-minute length; the easily anticipated “surprise climax” hardly justifies the journey.

Mohamed (Eltayef Dhaoui, left) and his younger brother Abdallah (Mohamed Ali Ayari)
are about to have a most unusual encounter.

My favorite entry, the delectably gentle and droll Nefta Football Club, is a France-Tunisia co-production directed by Yves Piat. The set-up sounds like the opening of a shaggy-dog joke: Two brothers meet a donkey wearing headphones … in the desert. 

In a Tunisian village where children play football (soccer) as often as possible, brothers Mohamed (Eltayef Dhaoui) and Abdallah (Mohamed Ali Ayari) use a motorcycle to scavenge throughout the nearby desert. They come across the aforementioned donkey, which — as we’ve learned, via a conversation between the two men (Lyès Salem and Hichem Mesbah) who await it — has been trained to return home while listening to a specific song through the aforementioned headphones.

The younger, innocent Abdallah doesn’t understand why the donkey’s satchels are filled with bags of white powder, but his older brother knows all too well. Piat’s ability to find humor against a premise of drug-smuggling is nothing short of genius, and the film’s conclusion is absolutely perfect.

Shifting to animation, two entries employ a similar stop-motion approach with “soft,” felt-like puppets. Los Angeles-based Chinese director Siqi Song’s Sister, at first blush, seems a study of typical sibling rivalry between a boy and his constantly annoying little sister, as they grow up alongside each other. These events are recalled by the boy’s “off-camera” adult self (Bingyang Liu), reflecting on childhood memories.

Song’s little fable frequently yields to impressionistic and even bizarre touches, as viewed by the boy: his infant sister ballooning into a huge baby early on (perhaps a metaphor for how much she bothers him); and, at another point, his pulling out her nose, Pinocchio-style. But these odd touches will be forgotten when Song reveals the point of her story, given additional emphasis by Liu’s somber narration. The finale is an emotional gut-punch.

Czech director Daria Kashcheeva’s Daughter, although treading similar territory, isn’t as successful. Her puppets are mildly grotesque and off-putting, and the story is too mundane: a middle-age woman still haunted by a childhood incident involving an injured bird, and her father’s failure to understand why it meant so much to her at the time. 

That moment of misunderstanding has stretched into a lifetime of emotional loss. Now, decades later, the father is an old man awaiting death in a hospital bed; his adult daughter stands at his side, similarly unable to offer the appropriate comfort.

The next two entries, heartwarming charmers, employ conventional animation; both feature impressively wise cats, and both tell their stories with little or no dialog. Hair Love — from American co-directors Matthew A. Cherry, Everett Downing Jr. and Bruce W. Smith — focuses on a momentous event in a little African-American girl’s life: the first time her father assumes responsibility for “doing” his daughter Zuri’s impossibly tangled hair.

The poor guy can’t begin to cope with the force of nature atop Zuri’s head, until moisturizer, hairpins, scrunchies and a vivid pink bow ride to the rescue. The story builds to a sweetly poignant finale, fueled at all times by the vibrant score from Paul Mounsey, Daniel D. Crawford and Taylor Graves.

Kitbull, a Pixar Sparkshort by director Rosana Sullivan, depicts the unlikely friendship that ignites between a fiercely independent stray kitten and a pit bull being groomed into a fighter. The kitten lives in a discarded box at one edge of the razor-wired yard where the dog is kept chained; their relationship blossoms during an impromptu game involving the bright orange cap of a plastic juice bottle.

The little black kitten’s personality is conveyed brilliantly via poses and expressions — Sullivan clearly is a cat person — and the dog’s more formidable bearing is offset by a gentle disposition wholly at odds with what its (mostly unseen) human master demands. The resulting story is amusing, suspenseful, chilling and touching.

Louis becomes increasingly frightened and frustrated, when his wife Michelle repeatedly
insists that things he discusses or describes as happening in the here and now,
actually took place long ago ... or not at all.

By far the strongest entry — and the certain winner — is French director Bruno Collet’s Mémorable. His medium of choice, clay animation, is absolutely perfect for this brilliantly conceived parable about the heartbreaking onset of dementia, and the horror of what somebody so afflicted experiences.

Louis, a painter long married to his similarly devoted wife, Michelle, finds his world shifting bizarrely before his very eyes. Michelle is the only person who appears “normal” to him, although he can’t always remember her name. Friends and even close family members have mutated into oddly distorted beings akin to scary creatures from space.

Worse yet, as time passes, even Michelle begins to destabilize and destructure; little blobs of herself waft away, as if on an unfelt breeze.

Collet achieves a shattering degree of emotional intensity in this 12-minute masterpiece.

As has become tradition, all these entries — along with the nominees in the documentary shorts category — will tour via road-show programs at select art house theaters; Sacramento’s Crest Theater will play them for three days, beginning Sunday.

Do take advantage.