Oscar nominated live action shorts
Reviews of all five movies nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.
Ala Kachuu (Take and Run)
(38 minutes)
An absolutely emotionally devastating tale about a Kyrgyz woman who is abducted and forced to marry in an oppressive male-dominated society. Sezim (Alina Turdumamatova) is a young girl who dreams of studying at university in the capital of Bishkek like her friend, Aksana. But her tradition-bound parents insist that she think about little more than marrying and starting a family. “The stone will stay where it has fallen,” her mother intones. She runs away to the city and gets a job in a bakery, but is kidnapped by Dayrbek, a man from a small village, who was supposed to marry her coworker instead. The worst part of her plight is that everyone, especially the older women, expect her to dry her tears and accept her fate. She repeatedly attempts to escape but is foiled by the perilous, wolf-filled mountains. A story both harrowing and uplifting.
On My Mind
(18 minutes)
Henrik (Rasmus Hammerich) is a sad-sack who shows up in an empty bar on a Tuesday morning. He looks like he might have slept outside. The owner of the bar, Preben (Ole Boisen), is doing the bills and is in a mood. The bartender, Louise (Camilla Bendeix), is the sort of tired but graceful soul who calls everybody “darling.” Henrik gulps his whiskey and is about to head out when he sees the karaoke machine. Do they have “Always on My Mind” by Elvis, he asks. They do. He insists upon singing it for his wife, Trine. In fact, he is quite insistent upon this point — slapping down 500 krone to convince Preben, who doesn’t want to be bothered, to turn it on. This Danish film is darkly sentimental and moving.
Please Hold
(19 minutes)
This satire looks at a near-future where the judicial system is handled by a for-profit corporation, Correcticorp. Mateo (Erick Lopez) is a young worker drone who finds himself confronted with a police drone on the way to his job. He’s thrown into a cell, cut off from all human contact or even unaware of what crime he’s being charged with. His only interaction is with an automated screen, from his A.I. attorney to a company he’s forced to knot clothes for to earn money for everything — meals, phone calls, etc. Want to turn the lights off to sleep? That’s an upgrade. I enjoyed the dystopian vision and our society’s pay-for mentality, but the movie plays more for comedy than commentary, so its message has less bite than it should.
The Long Goodbye
(13 minutes)
Riz Ahmed (“Sound of Metal”) stars in and co-wrote this dire cautionary tale about xenophobia and hatred in Great Britain, and everywhere. He plays a version of himself having a happy, chaotic day at home with his family. The young women prattle and gossip upstairs, he plays with his son while his father complains about them blocking the television, where news of anti-immigrant rallies play out. Then the violence shows up in their doorstep in a scene straight out of Nazi Germany. Touchy and frantic, though the ending rap/speech/screed is overly preachy and nearly incomprehensible to these American ears.
The Dress
(30 minutes)
This heartbreaking drama centers on a woman, Julia (Anna Dzieduszycka), who works as a maid in a dingy roadside motel/casino. It’s the sort of place where truck drivers sleep off the miles and people hook up in cheap rooms. As a little person, Julia’s never known real love and craves a sense of normalcy, commiserating with her only friend, an older woman named Renata (Dorota Pomykala). Julia is self-loathing but also has reservoirs of stubborn courage. Why does she stay? “If I left I would be a coward… I want to teach these people something.” One day she strikes up conversation with Bogdan (Szymon Piotr Warszawski), a kindly trucker passing through. He promises to take her on a date in four days, and she spends that interval alternating between rare joy and anxiety, trying to get a new dress made in time. A moody, dour but very human tale.
