2020 Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films

This year, I am reviewing all 15 films nominated across Oscar's three short subject categories. Versions of these blurbs have also been published at Cine-File.

OSCAR-NOMINATED LIVE ACTION SHORT FILMS

If the films nominated for this year’s Best Live Action Short Film Oscar appeared together in any other context, one would believe they were curated specifically to cover as many of our present-day sociopolitical challenges as possible: immigration policy and homelessness, racist police violence and the prison-industrial complex. That the Academy has managed to include films from both Israel and Palestine further reinforces a sense of an engineered optics, a reassurance that Oscar is leaving no stone unturned. None of the nominees exemplify this earnest appeal to the zeitgeist more than Travon Free’s and Martin Desmond Roe’s Two Distant Strangers (30 min), a riff on Groundhog Day through the lens of Black Lives Matter. Here, the time loop conceit is used to convey the grinding recurrence of police brutality against people of color, as a young black man keeps reliving his day each time he is murdered by the same white officer. While initially effective in its bluntness, the short eventually groans under its heavy-handed and manipulative construction (there’s a cute pooch the guy needs to get back home to); a late-breaking twist, meanwhile, diminishes the systemic racism at play by making the cop character seem like a lone loony with a vendetta. I suspect others will be more receptive to the film’s mix of high-concept storytelling and social justice messaging. 

Other nominees are decidedly less didactic, locating their political concerns in intimate human drama. In Doug Roland’s Feeling Through (18 min), a homeless teen develops a friendship with a deaf-blind man, helping him get home in the middle of the night. Roland’s patient, understated direction, sensitively attuned to the characters’ haptic mode of communication, grounds this moving tribute to everyday altruism. Similarly unfussy is Farah Nabulsi’s The Present (23 min), which portrays how a routine shopping trip in the West Bank turns into an arduous border-crossing ordeal for a Palestinian man and his daughter. 

The big ticket here, so to speak, is Elvira Lind’s The Letter Room (32 min), starring Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat. Isaac is a corrections officer at a penitentiary who is tasked with reading and monitoring the prisoners’ incoming missives. The film is evocatively shot, taking advantage of the strong overhead lighting in the prison hallways; the resulting sense of danger parallels the plot’s building intrigue, as Isaac’s officer is drawn deeper into the private lives of an inmate and his girlfriend. 

Tomer Shushan’s White Eye (20 min), for my money the best of the nominees, closes out the program. A sort of modern-day Bicycle Thieves, this moral parable concerns a fraught encounter between an Israeli man, the Eritrean immigrant who supposedly stole his bike, and law enforcement. Unfolding entirely in a single take that navigates around a street corner and through a butcher shop, the film depicts how a seemingly just pursuit can have terrible and unforeseen consequences. Despite this, it’s never polemical or showy; its power lies in its anguished, unvarnished empathy.