2023 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

These short films are available in a program from Shorts.TV, releasing theatrically.

Rating

Director

Tal Kantor (Letter to a Pig); Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess (Ninety-Five Senses); Yegane Moghaddam (Our Uniform); Stéphanie Clément (Pachyderme); Dave Mullins (War Is Over); Misan Harriman (After); Vincent René-Lortie (Invincible); Lasse Lyskjær Noer (Knight of Fortune); Nazrin Choudhury (Red White & Blue); Wes Anderson (Henry Sugar); Trish Adlesic, Nazenet Habtezghi, Sheila Nevins (ABCs); John Hoffman, Christine Turner (Barber); S. Leo Chiang (Island); Kris Bowers, Ben Proudfoot (Repair Shop); Sean Wang (Nai Nai)

Screenplay

Tal Kantor (Letter to a Pig); Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer (Ninety-Five Senses); Marc Rius (Pachyderme); Dave Mullins, Sean Lennon (War Is Over); John Julius Schwabach, Misan Harriman (After); Vincent René-Lortie (Invincible); Lasse Lyskjær Noer (Knight of Fortune); Nazrin Choudhury (Red White & Blue); Wes Anderson (Henry Sugar); S. Leo Chiang, David Teague (Island)

Length

17 min. (Letter to a Pig); 13 min. (Ninety-Five Senses); 7 min. (Our Uniform); 11 min. (Pachyderme); 11 min. (War Is Over); 18 min. (After); 30 min. (Invincible); 25 min. (Knight of Fortune); 23 min. (Red White & Blue); 37 min. (Henry Sugar); 27 min. (ABCs); 35 min. (Barber); 20 min. (Island); 39 min. (Repair Shop); 17 min. (Nai Nai)

Starring

Moriyah Meerson, ALexander Peleg, Ayelet Margalit, Indra Maharik (Letter to a Pig); Tim Blake Nelson (Ninety-Five Senses); Michelle Brubach, Christa Théret (Pachyderme); David Oyelowo (After); Léokim Beaumier-Lépine, Elia St-Pierre, Isabelle Blais, Pierre-Luc Brilliant, Ralph Prosper, Naoufel Chkirate, Miguel Tionjock, Ralphël Navarro-Gendron, Antoine Marchand-Gagnon, Florence Blain Mbaye (Invincible); Leif Andrée, Jens Jørn Spottag, Jesper Lohmann (Knight of Fortune); Brittany SNow, Juliet Donenfeld, Redding Munsell (Red White & Blue); Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade (Henry Sugar)

MPAA Rating

PG (Henry Sugar); All others not rated.

Reviews

This year’s nominated short films are a disappointing batch with a few gems mixed in. The topical ones are a bit boring while the most interesting are the least political, a rarity in short films. First let’s discuss the animated features, then the live action ones, and finish up with the documentaries.

Animated Short Films

Letter to a Pig

A Holocaust survivor tells a group of bored elementary students about the pig that helped save him from slaughter by the Nazis. A hand drawn effort, the short focuses on a young girl whose imagination fills in the blanks of the story and extrapolates her disruptive fellow students and how they might have reacted were they faced with the same horrific situation. The film’s harrowing elements are its use of sound and silence to tell the desperate story on display. It’s a fascinating effort, though the pig metaphor risks turning into a Pink Floyd commercial late in the film.

In our society, young people have always struggled to grasp the immense complexity of challenging historical precedent, often turning a blind eye to the valuable lessons figures like the elderly man in this story are trying to impart. For all of the students’ inattentiveness, one girl embodies the emotional heft of the film, questioning her classmates’ dispassionate and disruptive behavior. The lessons she draws from the herd mentality of bored school students helps parallel well to the groupthink that allowed Nazism to flourish.

The animation is a bit scattered at times, shifting from simple line drawings into realistic sketches, blended together in a chaotic but not wholly unpleasant style. The use of color is an interesting choice, but it isn’t one that works as well as it should, drawing attention to the pig in specific. What ruminations the viewer can take from the ending is muted, which makes the film hard to appreciate. While not the best of the batch, it’s certainly not the worst; a middle of the road choice.

Ninety-Five Senses

How did a film like this make the shortlist? Because of the twist in the middle probably. It’s an effective one that almost mitigates the droning, misanthropic narration by the protagonist, voiced by Tim Blake Nelson. Ostensibly, the film is about an elderly man waxing philosophical about the five senses and discussing which of his he most enjoys, which he’s lost and regretted, and where they’ve led him.

A simple hand-drawn style, the animation is decent but oftentimes too inconsequential. Sourcing out the animated segments to different animators is handled decently well with the art style managing to stay fairly similar. Yet, each of the fantastical elements are overplayed and overly familiar, barely employed to any innovative degree. While describing the five senses and then the ninety-five that we don’t experience, his ruminations are fatalistic, which plays into the premise but also makes for a difficult sit.

When the twist comes, it makes sense; However, by that point it comes as less of a shock and more of a forced plot turn. He’s already dug into the rote lamentation of cell phones diminishing eyesight and becoming too commonplace. It is at that moment that a lot of viewers are going to drift away. While a kindly old grandfather might have made a more empathetic character, it would have dulled the premise a bit, yet would have made the whole thing more approachable.

Our Uniform

Past years have seen the frequent nomination of films about women’s lives in Iran and other Arabic countries that treat women like property. Our Uniform tries to step away from the more egregious elements of those stories by giving it a slightly more upbeat approach, settling into the narrative of a young woman narrating her school life in a virulently sexist society.

The animated shorts typically soar when a new or inventive use of animation is employed. This particular short used clothing and clothes-related items, usually pants and tape measures, to tell its story, animating directly onto the pants or overlaying animation onto them. This fascinating style keeps the viewer’s attention while laying out an interesting, but straightforward narrative. Telling viewers the troubles young girls have in schools being restricted to hijab rather than being able to express themselves as those in western cultures do.

By the sheer originality of the art, this ranks among the best of the short films in spite of a familiar and well-worn foundation. It doesn’t tell much of a story except the liberation the young girl feels when finally able to dress as she sees fit after leaving Iran, but it lacks the emotional impact of last year’s The Red Suitcase, which covered similar thematic territory. A solid second place among this year’s animated slate.

Pachyderme

Short films have a tendency to avoid conventional storytelling techniques. This often makes them feel esoteric and unapproachable. Pachyderme is such a short and is saved by its lovely animation style. In this story, a young girl spends a week with her grandparents lamenting the most frustrating elements of living with them while her parents are off on a grand adventure of their own.

The pachyderme of the title is the animal from which a giant tusk on the grandparents’ second floor was taken. It doesn’t seem to have any thematic relevance without reading far more into the story than one should. The young girl tells of the somewhat frightening noises of a creaky old house in the middle of the night, blending into the wallpaper where she feels safe, and going to the lake where she muses on the potential of drowning. This film isn’t an entirely morbid affair, but it lacks a traditional happy ending, but only if you delve too deep into symbolism that might not actually be meaningful.

Without going into the reason for these observations, two events late in the film add impetus to the tusk and its eventual fate. It becomes a metaphor at that point that’s easily ignored as it feels like a stretch to get there. Audiences aren’t likely to appreciate this for anything other than its animation, which is indeed beautifully rendered. The use of silhouette, shadows, and backgrounds blending into the fore make for a pleasant reason to visit with this short even if the story itself doesn’t quite get the viewer there.

War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko

When you think about the title War Is Over! and its reference to John and Yoko, the first thing you might think of is Lennon’s unparalleled masterpiece “Imagine.” Yet, that song isn’t referenced once. Instead, it’s a song on which both of them sing, “So This is Christmas.” When the song finally plays at the end of the short, it makes sense; however, getting there isn’t quite as clear.

The film gets going as a carrier pigeon flies over a battlefield, dodging and weaving through the explosions of cannon fire in the air. Given a message by a gruff commander, he takes wing once again and delivers a message to a bespectacled soldier who lifts the missive from its leg to find a chess move. It’s only after the pigeon delivers a return move to a different soldier that we understand this is a different carrier and it is going back-and-forth with something to keep the soldiers occupied while war rages around them.

Using the Unreal engine as an animation tool is a fascinating use of a medium that is designed for computer game development. The simple style is fluid and distinctive even when its subject is familiar. As the war progresses and the soldiers continue their moves, we learn more about what is going on in the war. By eliminating identifying characteristics to position these events in any particular war, it creates a universality to the film’s theme that helps it resonate even further. While it has a somewhat predictable destination and the musical cues feel a bit tacky at one particular moment, the end result is easily one of the most engaging shorts in the animated program, one that has a beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes conventional storytelling makes for better work.

Live Action Short Films

The After

On to the live action short film slate and a generally better crop of candidates with no bad entries and a couple of really good ones. We’ll start on the lower end of the scale with The After, an exploration of trauma, grief, and the struggles to move on. It’s one of a handful of efforts this year that star recognizable faces. This one featuring David Oyelowo.

Oyelowo plays a businessman who makes time for his wife and young daughter. During one such outing, a horrible incident takes both from him while he was busy on a work call. Unable to escape the gravity well of grief, we later find that he’s taken a job as a rideshare driver, carting various types of people from place to place, oblivious to their lives and activities until a bickering couple changes his perspective.

The narrative here is pretty straight forward, a commonplace exploration of grief. The catharsis for the audience and the bereaved comes at an expected moment with a single act of kindness that comes from a place of understanding and sympathy. It’s mostly organic but everything is staged so regimentally that the emotional connection we’re meant to feel doesn’t quite land with the impact intended.

Invincible

Based on a true story, or at least as true of one as the filmmaker allows us to know, the film is about a juvenile delinquent whose embrace of a world outside the detention center is too alluring not to explore. Unknown actors populate the film, though they all deliver solid performances including Léokim Beaumier-Lépine who anchors the film as the lead character.

Films about disaffected youths who have run afoul of the law are fairly common, many of them exploring the struggles of coming of age in tumultuous situations. This short is no different from those, even giving young Marc a compassionate heart and a knack for poetry. It all seems familiar while simultaneously feeling a bit cold and removed from the audience. While we can empathize with a youth yearning for freedom, we can’t help but wonder if his recklessness weren’t better examined in a psychological setting rather than a prison one.

Even for kids who’ve spent time in similar types of institutions, the concepts of longing to breathe free, rebelling against authority, and recriminations about leading a caged life will find it difficult to find where this film intends the audience to arrive. It’s a destination that is set up at the beginning and rewarded in the middle, but ultimately feels a bit hollow. This is easily the least impressive of the five live action shorts but is worth watching just for Beaumier-Lépine’s performance, which is striking in its simplicity and evocative nature.

Knight of Fortune

Comedies will occasionally find their way into the short film slates and they have a tendency to win thanks to their ability to lift the viewer beyond the moribund or taciturn. Knight of Fortune is one of two comedies in this year’s live action short film line up. While this is a more deadpan type of humor, it’s considerably funnier than the other entry.

Karl (Leif Andrée) has lost his wife and is at the morgue to see his wife’s body and say his goodbyes. Distracting himself first with a flickering overhead light, then finding refuge in a restroom, a fellow bathroom-goer (Jens Jørn Spottag) first asks him for some toilet paper, then some more and finally for his assistance in saying goodbye to his own wife. The audience will no doubt find this interaction darkly amusing, setting the tone for the rest of the piece, which only gets more humorous as it progresses.

This dark comedy effortlessly blends an emotionally hefty subject matter with light touches of situational humor that help alleviate the audience’s concerns about the emotional underpinnings of the effort. Andrée and Spottag are stellar, as is Jesper Lohmann as the morgue attendant who must act as the straight man in a concerning, but seemingly frequent situation. Like last year’s winner An Irish Goodbye, this film wants to explore grief from a more amusing perspective while deftly handling the dramatic elements. A strong second-place effort in this year’s slate.

Red, White and Blue

The best short film in this year’s roster is both topical and shocking. Taking its title from American patriotism, the land of the free, the short explores a young mother of two who is saving up to travel two states away to Illinois in order to get an abortion. This slice of life drama takes a little time to build steam but is absolutely worth the journey.

Brittany Snow spent her youth on television but came to prominence with a handful of high profile roles on the big screen, including the vaunted Pitch Perfect series. It comes as a bit of a surprise that she is now playing the part of a mother, this one a diner waitress in Arkansas scraping together tips to save for her eventual journey to Illinois. She has to travel across two states because the law in Arkansas and its neighboring states prohibits abortion and she is in a desperate situation.

It’s impossible to come away from this short and not be gutted by the late-film revelation of the reason for the abortion, but the fact that an abortion needs to be obtained isn’t the alarming situation, it’s the nature of the abortion and the fact that the closest state she can get to that has an abortion clinic is two states away, a four-to-five-hour drive. That a situation like this would require such a Herculean and expensive feat just to get accomplished is devastating and is perhaps one of the best pro-choice productions yet mounted. Supporters of abortion access will resolve from shock and dismay to disgust and anger as a result of the film but perhaps some impressionable anti-choice women might see something like this and realize that strict, draconian abortion laws are not in the public’s best interest.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Wes Anderson has spent his career working on full length features with a particular aesthetic that is instantly recognizable, even to those who aren’t fans of his work. His compelling, but quirky world view works well in large doses, but with this adaptation of one of Roald Dahl’s short stories, he makes the case for a shorter, not necessarily smaller, palette for the filmmaker.

Featuring an impressive cast of actors including Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, and Ben Kingsley, each in dual roles, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is design perfected and would have been a deserving nominee for Best Production Design in spite of its abbreviated duration. The aesthetic used is that of a stage play wherein set pieces are maneuvered in and out of the frame as the settings and environments change, the actors sometimes even changing clothes during the proceeding. Narrated at first by Fiennes, the point of view shifts between timeframes and narrators with Cumberbatch and Patel also doing time in the spotlight.

That the film doesn’t entirely work is not a result of a lack of production qualities. The sets, costumes, and lighting are all peak Anderson but the heart of the short story, about a bored rich man (Cumberbatch) who attempts to uncover the origins of an old man’s (Kingsley) ability to see things without his eyesight is an interesting concept but in spite of the solid line delivery, everything moves from one situation to the next with little to no intrigue. The characters are finite and sometimes dull, the story isn’t as fascinating as it initially seems, and, by the film’s end, the audience will struggle to have understood what the point of the production was other than to create a beautiful tableau for a tedious and uninspired narrative.

Documentary Short Subjects

The ABCs of Book Banning

Book banning is a central plank of authoritarian regimes as it deprives useful knowledge to those who could use it as a tool to enact change and stop such dictatorships from forming. It’s also a tool of conservatives in the U.S. to prevent school children from learning about “alternative” lifestyles as well as controversial subjects that paint the banners as something other than concerned individuals wanting to ensure children aren’t injured by the works they read.

As such, a film like The ABCs of Book Banning helps to expose the positive and life-affirming topics that books can provide to impressionable young children. This short starts off with an elderly woman attending a board meeting where bans were under discussion. It then shifts to a litany of children discussing why they are confused over the bans and why the books they are reading are important. This is interspersed with numerous books that are banned, restricted, or challenged and selected snippets from them to be read aloud to the audience.

While this is an important subject and those who watch the film aren’t about to ban books themselves, it’s a film that lacks a strong impartial hand. The cherry-picked verses may fit the intent of the short film but they don’t speak to the larger issue and can be easily dismissed as just what they are, phrases and comments that may get at the heart of the source but don’t express the concerns some parents might have. The decision to let children express themselves is a good one but that makes the elderly woman’s bookend comments (as she appears at the beginning and end of the film with the same comments extended at the end to include her full remarks) feel out of place. She may make good points, as do the children, but the structural insecurity of the film is exposed by the use of this bit and, in the end, it doesn’t really feel like a film that will change hearts and minds.

The Barber of Little Rock

The recurrent themes of the vast majority of selections in the documentary short subject category over the years has shared one thing: topicality. That’s no less true of The Barber of Little Rock. This short explores the concept of banking/opening a business while Black, establishing a need for financial support for communities of color, the disparity of available credit institutions, and the inherent prejudice built into the system. This is deftly explored from the view point of a barber in Little Rock, Arkansas who saw the issues facing his community and stepped up to create an emergency funding apparatus through government funding to help those entrepreneurs in his area get the monetary support they need to escape their situation.

Arlo Washington built his own business with little assistance from outside sources and turned it into a thriving success that helps members of the Black community not only become hair stylists but to improve their station and start their own businesses. His experience helps inform all that he does and it’s clear from the entirety of the film that he does it to support them not to thrive off their desperation. The film’s focus shifts to a handful of Black men and women who either face financial ruin and need a temporary boost or those who seek higher success in starting their own businesses.

The film’s inability to focus on any one situation may color in the details of the various kinds of institutional prejudice the community faces but it sometimes makes the short feel like it’s trying to be too many things at once. That doesn’t mute its importance or impact. There are emotional beats that resonate and the issues of the film get sufficient coverage to have an impact on the viewer. It’s the kind of situation that might have merited a longer runtime to incorporate more personal and impactful stories, though it might have lost some of its succinctness in the process.

Island in Between

Kinmen is an island that sits near China’s shore but belongs to Taiwan, a nation that China considers its property but which Taiwan believes is independent. This island acts as the first bulwark against any imminent invasion and remains a location where Taiwan’s compulsory military service can be taken.

The film is told from the point of view of director S. Leo Chiang, born and raised in Taiwan, having serving his military service on Kinmen, and subsequently traveled to and lived in China and the United States. He examines the fraught political situation between mainland China, the independent Taiwan, and a U.S. government that’s providing what support it can to ensure Taiwan’s independence. The short does give some information about what life is like on the edge of conflict and the uneasy tension that has built up between the two forces, the economic powerhouse of Taiwan and the military powerhouse of China.

No solutions are provided, focusing on the simple existence that takes place on Kinmen, the first line of defense against China. It’s a fascinating piece providing information to many viewers that they might not have otherwise had but, other than that, the purpose of such a film remains elusive. The dire situation is established but poorly evinced by the filmmaker who seems to have a point to make but makes it too softly to be of any consequence.

The Last Repair Shop

In Los Angeles, the school system provides students with free musical instruments, a lifeline to music for many students who don’t have the money to afford such luxuries but who are helped tremendously by the presence of in their lives. This film looks at a handful of men and women who repair instruments for L.A.’s public schools while also exploring their love of music and how much it means for them to give back to students who are reaping the benefits that had changed their own lives.

The film centers around four departments within the repair shop, stringed instruments, brass, woodwinds, and piano. Introducing each of these sections is a student who plays one such instrument where they explain why they are grateful for having the very instruments the school system provides. Each of the employees who repairs instruments describes in detail how they became interested in music or how they became employed by the shop or both, weaving a fascinating tapestry of a queer man, immigrants, and the indigent and what place music plays in the establishment of their identities and work.

Capped off by a rousing orchestral piece composed by co-director Kris Bowers and featuring L.A.’s alumni orchestra, The Last Repair Shop is a warm, compassionate plea for the support of music in the lives of students. It’s not overtly political but nevertheless identifies and celebrates that varying types of people find their way to music as a refuge from the turmoil of their lives. It’s a rich production that leaves the viewer emotionally-invested and supportive of the film’s positions. This was easily the best of this bunch of shorts and, after Red, White and Blue, the second best short in all of the fifteen films.

Nai Nai & Wài Pó

Wrapping things up with an apolitical, slice of life documentary, Nai Nai and Wài Pó are the grandmothers of filmmaker Sean Wang who returns home periodically to visit the women who live together now that their husbands have passed and support one another through their daily routines.

From sun-up to sun-down, the warm lives of Nai Nai and Wài Pó are familiar to many and provide a sweet look at the lives of women who seek companionship to live out their days with dignity and compassion. With the occasional bit of home video and photographs, Wang allows the audience to experience the natural charm of his subjects as they perform for him in ways they wouldn’t do when alone. This is where the film struggles to make the case for an unbiased look at the lives of these women.

There are no political statements to be made and watching them interact with one another and wax philosophical is a pleasant time waster but the point of the production, to document their lives before their inevitable deaths, is uninspired. The overtly political and the passively insightful have equal place in the realm of documentary filmmaking but to have a film that merely documents the lives of two figures in the filmmaker’s life makes the decision to honor this short a confusing one. This is especially true when considering that even the poetic approach to life the women have differs little from other similar characters we’ve seen on film and the viewer is bound to ask what the point is and that question is never sufficiently as the film never provides insight into it.

Overall, this year’s batch of short films aren’t as impressive as past years and while there are clearly standouts, the number of middle-of-the-road efforts is at a multi-year high, which is unfortunate. Certainly, there had to be better productions than some of the ones selected this year.

Review Written

February 16, 2024