For most of us who loved Incredibles 2 , the eight-minute short film Bao that played before it in the theatres made for as emotive and stirring an experience. About parents and children; families inherited and created; ties that bind and smother as against the leap into an unknown freedom; coping with loneliness to eventually finding love and reconciliation, all through food, Domee Shi’s animated short resonated around the world, the dilemmas of its aging immigrant Chinese mom could hold a mirror to mothers in any corner.
Dysfunctional ties
Just as affecting a look at family, albeit a crumbling one, is Trevor Jimenez’s hand-animated, 16-minute Weekends . A young boy is “lost between weekends” with his life divided between two homes, that of a piano-playing mother and of the father, where he can watch TV and eat popcorn endlessly. In flitting between the worlds the child can’t belong anywhere.
As his nightmares merge and flow and become into reality, the predominant emotion one is left with is his deep-seated alienation and heartbreaking disconnect, of the desperation of lovelessness and loneliness. And all the while, the Dire Straits number, ‘Money for nothing’ keeps playing on in the background. Emily’s world is just as divided as Jimenez’s protagonist in the 10-minute Irish animation, Louise Bagnall’s Late Afternoon .
Only in her case it’s about moving between past and present, about diving deep within to relive her yesterdays and forge a connect with the fading memories. As against it, Andrew Chesworth and Bobby Pontillas’ eight-minute US-China co-production, One Small Step is about the future — Luna wants to be an astronaut but will she be able to reach the stars? Animal Behaviour is a 14- minute Canadian animation made by David Fine and Alison Snowden, about five animals regularly who meet to discuss their inner angst in a group therapy sessions that are led by a canine psychotherapist.
Treat for moviegoers
Which of these five animated shorts wins it big at the Academy Awards on February 24 is anybody’s guess but in a first of sorts for India, ShortsTV, the world’s only TV channel dedicated to short movies, is bringing the Oscar-nominated short films — live action as well as animation — to the cinemas, in association with PVR. The films are being shown exclusively in PVR Cinemas across nine cities from this weekend onwards — in Mumbai,Delhi/NCR, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Chandigarh. In Mumbai, film buffs can catch them at PVR Juhu, PVR Kurla and PVR Icon Goregaon.
There is also a bonus screening of the documentary, Period. End of Sentence , along with the five live action shorts. The Rayka Zehtabchi and Melissa Berton documentary has Guneet Monga and Mandakini Kakar on board as two of the executive producers and Shaan Vyas as one of the co-producers and is all about a sanitary pad revolution in Kathi Khera village, in Hapur, Uttar Pradesh.
Diverse in everyway
Carter Pilcher, Chief Executive at ShortsTV, calls the shorts as one of the most interesting and surprising filmmaking categories recognised by the Oscars every year. “Some of 2018’s most diverse filmmaking is represented in the short film categories this year,” he says.
The diversity is evident in the nominees’ countries of origin — Ireland, Canada, China, Spain to the United States. Several films focus on Asia or are from filmmakers of Asian descent and there are five women nominees in the category.
According to Pilcher, while the animated shorts this year are inspirational, the live action nominees tackle hard-hitting subjects. Like Vincent Lambe’s Irish film Detainment , based on interview transcripts of a true case, is about two 10-year-old boys detained by police under suspicion of abducting and murdering a toddler. Canadian film, Marguerite by Marianne Farley is about the friendship between an aging woman and her nurse, “that inspires her to unearth unacknowledged longing and helps her make peace with her past”. The Spanish film Madre by Rodrigo Sorogoyen is about the nightmare of a single mother on a phone call with her seven-year-old son who is on vacation with his father but can’t seem to find him. Guy Nattiv’s Skin is yet another look at the simmering race relations in the USA.
ShortsTV claims a surge in popularity for short movies in India and around the world. Globally, this marks the 14th consecutive year of the theatrical screening of Oscar-nominated shorts. In 2018 they earned over $3.5 million in worldwide box office gross, double the revenue of figures from two years ago. The 2019 release will be the biggest theatrical release of Oscar shorts rolling out to more than 600 screens across the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, South Africa, Australia and India, and has already achieved its best ever opening weekend box office in the United States.
