“Oscar-Nominated Shorts: Live-Action”
Rated: R. At the Coolidge Corner Theater and Kendall Square Cinema.
Grade: B plus
As a group, the live-action short films nominated for an Academy Award this year are less punishing emotionally and more of a reflection of our racial-political moment in history. In “The Present,” young Palestinian husband and father Yusef (Saleh Bakri) wants to go shopping with his preteen daughter Yasmine (Mariam Kanj) to buy his wife (Mariam Basha), Yasmine’s mother, an anniversary present of a new refrigerator. To do so, he and Yasmine must pass through a security checkpoint guarded by young, cocky and angry Israeli soldiers. The film, directed and co-written by Palestinian-British human rights activist Farah Nabulsi, is a searing portrait of Israeli-Palestinian conflict in miniature. The soldiers and the Palestinians are both victims of an unfair, dehumanizing system. Bakri and Kanj are especially good as the loving father and daughter.
In writer-director Doug Roland’s New York City urban parable “Feeling Through,” which was executive produced by Marlee Matlin, we encounter the old story of people who feels sorry for themselves until they meet someone in tougher circumstances. Young African-American Tereek (a terrific Steven Prescod) is homeless for reasons we do not know. After parting from his friends, Tereek has nowhere to go. He texts a young lady and she offers him a place for the night. But Tereek meets Artie (Robert Tarango), an older man, who cannot see or speak or hear. Artie asks Tereek for help catching a bus, and Tereek feels he must stay with Artie, and a simple act of human kindness shines a comforting light in the midst of our COVID despair.
In the dark comedy “Two Distant Strangers,” Carter James (Joey Bada$$, “Mr. Robot”), an African-American cartoonist from Brooklyn trying to get home to his dog Jeter after a night with a young woman named Perri (Zaria Simone) is killed over and over again by a racist New York City policeman named Merk (a memorable Andrew Howard, “Watchmen”). The film is like a 25-minute “Groundhog Day” meets Black Lives Matter. Co-directed by Travon Free and Martin Desmond Roe and written by Free, “Two Distant Strangers” is a nightmare America is having right now.
In Tomer Shushan’s one-take film “White Eye,” a stolen bicycle causes two men who might never have crossed paths to come face to face. A young man named Omer (Daniel Gad) finds a white bike locked up on the street and recognizes it as his stolen property. Because he did not file a complaint, the police will not help him. Omer learns that the bike’s new owner is an immigrant worker named Yunes (Dawit Tekleab). Assuming that Yunes, a Black man from Eritrea, is the person who stole his bike, the owner calls the police, and the SXSW Grand jury award winner turns into a sad lesson in white privilege.
Probably because it stars “Star Wars” actor Oscar Isaac, “The Letter Room” is the short live-action film that seems most like a feature. Richard (Isaac) is a singleton guard at a prison, who is “promoted” to the head of correspondence. This means that Richard must partially read all letters sent to inmates. An old man on death row asks Richard about letters from his daughter, which stopped coming two years earlier. Another man, a younger death row inmate, receives letters full of sexual and psychic longing from his ex Rosita (Alia Shawkat). Reading them, the lonely Richard falls in love with the words, if not the writer. Written and directed by Eliva Lind, who is married to Isaac, “The Letter Room” is a beautiful expression of love’s ubiquity. In the year of the pandemic, the Oscar-nominated live-action short category is full of films that look beyond our differences and ask us to see the humanity within.
(“Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Live Action” contains violence and profanity)
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April 04, 2021 at 12:15AM
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Oscar-nominated live-action short films reflect our moment in history - Boston Herald
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