The 10 short narrative films nominated for Oscars at the Feb. 26 Academy Awards are a delightfully stealthy alternative to the Best Picture contenders.
By this point of the months-long awards season, most movie lovers are overly familiar with the features competing for Oscar’s top prize, nine in total this year: La La Land, Moonlight, Arrival, Manchester by the Sea, Hidden Figures, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Lion and Hell or High Water.
What most of us aren’t up to speed on — or burned out on — are the short films the Academy also honours, in particular the narrative shorts split between animated and live-action categories.
TIFF Bell Lightbox offers a chance to catch up, with screenings starting Friday of all 10 films, which include two Canadian contenders, Blind Vaysha and Pear Brandy and Cigarettes.
Freed from the demands of mainstream storytelling, the Oscar shorts are often more creative and forward-looking than their feature film brethren.
They tend to have fresh faces and a more eager embrace of new techniques and technology. They show where film is headed — Pearl, one of the animated nominees, is the first virtual reality film to compete for an Oscar. But high tech doesn’t mean low emotion: the father-and-daughter story of Pearl had tears running down my cheeks.
And these shorts can be as current as a Trump tweet. Two of the live-action nominees, Enemies Withinand Silent Nights, address the xenophobia and refugee crises bedevilling Europe, not to mention the rest of the world.
Oscar shorts do all this without wearing out their welcome. None of this year’s narrative shorts runs past 35 minutes, and you can see all 10 in just over three hours. Here’s my take on the 10 nominees, and the ones I’d give Oscars to:
BEST SHORT FILM (ANIMATED):
Blind Vaysha (Theodore Ushev, Canada): Marking the 74th Oscar nomination for Canada’s National Film Board, this boldly expressionist short uses a linocut animation process that resembles Vincent van Gogh paintings. Adapted from a short story by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, and narrated by Montreal actress Caroline Dhavernas (Passchendaele), it’s the story of a girl named Vaysha who is born with one green eye and one brown eye, one seeing the future and one seeing only the past. It’s a metaphoric message about learning to embrace the now.
Borrowed Time (Andrew Coats, Lou Hamou-Lhadj, U.S.): Made by two Pixar employees in their spare time, but using the company’s equipment, this is a father-and-son story with a real cliffhanger, a literal one. A Wild West sheriff returns to the scene of a terrible accident that forced him to grow up quickly as a young man, another reminder of holding close the ones you love.
Pear Cider and Cigarettes (Robert Valley, Canada/U.K.): Vancouver animator Valley (TV’s Eon Flux) has already published two graphic novels about Techno Stypes, his daredevil friend from childhood who took the rock ’n’ roll mantra “Born to be Wild” to extremes. Valley uses an innovative Photoshop animation process to bring Techno’s tragically poetic life to the big screen, with a story of what it means to be a friend in both good times and bad.
Pearl (Patrick Osborne, U.S.): Filmmaker Osborne won the Oscar in this category for Disney’s whimsical Feast three years ago, but he’s really upped the ante here with both his story and technique. Made for Google Spotlight Stories, it’s the first VR film nominated for an Oscar (although it will screen in conventional 2D projection). Set inside a battered hatchback named Pearl to the tune of heart-tugging theme song “No Wrong Way Home,” it’s a father-and-daughter road trip across America and through life. Any parent whose eyes water reading Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever to a child will want to keep the Kleenex handy while watching this.
Piper (Alan Barillaro, U.S.): The most conventional of the animated shorts is also the best known: this Pixar heart warmer screened before Finding Dory, last year’s second-biggest film. It’s the perfectly aw-shucks and nearly photorealistic tale of a young sandpiper and its mama. Pixar might seem like the 800-lb gorilla in this category, but it’s been 16 years since the ’toon titan took short-film gold.
My choice for the Oscar:Pearl.
BEST SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION):
Enemies Intérieurs (Enemies Within) (Sélim Azzazi, France): This directing debut by sound designer Sélim Azzazi is set in the pre-Sept. 11 France of 1998, but the message about racism and xenophobia finds its current counterpart in the Muslim travel ban of Donald Trump’s America. A man of Arab descent, long a peaceful and patriotic immigrant, finds himself enduring an Orwellian interrogation when he applies for French citizenship. Azzazi bases the story on the travails of his Algerian father, who applied for French citizenship in the 1990s.
La Femme et le TGV (The Woman and the TGV) (Timo von Gunten, Switzerland): Fans of Wes Anderson’s immaculately constructed comedies will love this one, which is based on the true story of a lonely widow named Elise and the TGV train driver she becomes infatuated with. Played with charm and wit by Jane Birkin, Elise lives a clockwork existence of running a small bakery and withdrawing from most modern things — with the exception of the high-speed TGV she waves at twice daily from her trackside home. One day, the TGV driver contacts her and Elise’s life and routines suddenly change.
Silent Nights (Aske Bang, Denmark): There’s a feature’s worth of melodrama and social issues packed into 30 minutes, not to the film’s benefit. But the hard life of being a refugee from Africa in the northern country of Denmark is amply illustrated. A volunteer for a Copenhagen homeless shelter finds herself falling for an illegal immigrant, much to the dismay of her openly racist mother. Romance ensues but so does a fateful reckoning, forcing the open-hearted woman to question her beliefs.
Sing (Kristóf Deák, Hungary): Not to be confused with the recent feature-length animation Sing, which isn’t nominated for any Oscars. Worthy of an O. Henry short story, this is the deceptively simple story of a Hungarian children’s choir led by a taskmaster teacher who will stop at nothing to win the top prize in a singing contest. Based on a true story, the lesson imparted is it’s better to enjoy an experience and lose rather than to fake it and win.
Timecode (Juanjo Giménez Peña, Spain): The strangest of the live action contenders also has the most impressive list of advance prizes, among them the Palme d’Or for Best Short at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival. A tale of kicking against the conformity of our technology-obsessed world, it features two parking lot attendants who find a novel way to cope with the boredom of their jobs.
My choice for the Oscar:La Femme et le TGV.
Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.
Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.
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