A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness (HBOGo/HBONow)

HBO is on a streak at the Academy Awards when it comes to Best Documentary Short, having distributed three of the last five winners, including this year’s A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness a few weeks after winning. Directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who also won the Oscar four years ago with Saving Face, A Girl in the River is a frighteningly honest tale of Pakistani honor killings. The film settles on Saba, a rare survivor of an honor killing, who was shot in the face by her father and uncle and left for dead in a river. The film then follows her as she struggles to regain her life, bond with her in-laws and also prosecute her family in a court system stacked against her.

Obaid-Chinoy is a masterful filmmaker and A Girl in the River tells Sabu’s story with economy and intelligence. Obaid-Chinoy makes the culture Saba is a victim of clear to the untrained Western eye, yet the film never speaks down to us. Instead, it marches ahead at breakneck speed. The fact that the film also manages to capture the voices of everyone involved in the story, and give them the space to tell their side of things, is its greatest asset. While the film finds honor killings brutal and unwarranted, Obaid-Chinoy is smart enough to know that the people who commit these killings are not one-dimensional villains. She gives them their room to tell their story, just as she gives room to Saba, her mother, her mother-in-law, the village elders and the lawyers to tell their story. We are left to discover on our own how horrific this tradition is, and how barbaric Saba’s treatment truly is, while a lesser film would have shoved it in our face.

Finders Keepers (Netflix)

The term “finders keepers” refers to the dubious term of whether the person who finds something owns it, or whether the original owner who lost it has a claim to the object. As we all remember from our childhood, “finder keepers, losers weepers.” It is a bizarre title to choose for Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel’s new documentary about Shannon Whisnant, who purchased a smoker at an auction only to find John Wood’s amputated foot inside. While the film has many interests, who has any legal or ethical claim to the foot is far from the top. The few law enforcement or legal members featured in the film get only the quickest of focus (except for a truly bizarre trip to the courtroom of television justice Judge Mathis). Carberry and Tweel could care less who should own the foot. They care much more about why everyone is getting so riled up over a foot and the local media circus that it created.

There is a great story at the heart of Finders Keepers: John Wood loses both his father and his foot in a plane crash; Shannon Whisnant, in constant search for fame and fortune, stumbles across the foot and tries to turn it into his 15 minutes of fame; and the two families around them who struggle with their loved ones’ peculiarities. Carberry and Tweel have stumbled on a Christopher Guest-like community of eccentric obsessives swirling around a very bizarre central event. There is a lot in the film that sucks you in, but there isn’t quite enough of it. The event isn’t quite complex enough to carry the film through all the way, and in the second half you can feel the filmmakers stretching the boundaries of the story to fill up their feature-length running time. There is 40 minutes of riveting material here stretched out to 90 minutes, and Wood and Whisnant would have been better served with a shorter dramatization.