As someone who watches and studies the Academy Awards every year, I can tell you that the Best Documentary Short Subject nominees are frequently heavy, and often depressing. This milieu is often utilized to explore and expose serious social issues and tragic tales that warrant more than a typical nightly news item, but often don’t have enough of a narrative throughline to carry a feature-length presentation.
They’re ideal short subjects, but like all the short subject Oscar categories, they were never intended to play alongside each other, and programs like Roadside Attractions’ “98th Oscar Nominated Shorts,” which compiles all five nominees into one program, can sometimes be a tough sit as a result.
Fortunately, although this year’s nominees are mostly serious looks at serious topics, this isn’t one of those programs that feels oppressive. It’s a satisfying, if dour, look at prominent world crises and what many decent human beings are trying to do about them. There’s a sense of hope, if not for the people whose deaths incited these incidents, then for the human race, since we can still respond to horrible times with empathy and hope.
Oh yeah, and one of them is about donkeys. That’s a lot less intense, but in many ways a lot more complex.
Check out my reviews of “Perfectly a Strangeness,” “The Devil Is Busy,” “Armed With Only a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud,” “All the Empty Rooms” and “Children No More: ‘Were and Gone’” below.
And don’t miss my reviews of all the Oscar-nominated live-action short films and animated short films.
‘Perfectly a Strangeness’
Again, the Academy Award-nominated documentary shorts are usually a heavy group, with difficult subjects like — this year alone — abortion rights, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, school shootings and the Palestinian genocide. But there’s often one outlier, and this year it’s “Perfectly a Strangeness,” the film about three donkeys wandering around an abandoned observatory.
In some ways that’s all that happens. Alison McAlpine’s film is 15 minutes of donkeys wandering across the desert, finding an observatory, then wandering through that. Even though it’s not a “hard-hitting topic,” it’s a beautifully reflective film. Quiet. Evocative. The visual juxtaposition is peacefully apocalyptic, as we ponder where everybody went, and the significance of animals engaging, obliviously, with the machinery mankind created to investigate the unknown. On a more subtextual level, “Perfectly a Strangeness” also evokes biblical imagery of three travelers drawn to a magical place with a mysterious connection to the stars.
Then again, there are those in the audience who might watch McAlpine’s film and emerge with little more than, “Yup, those are donkeys, alright,” and refrain from asking further questions. They’d be correct, technically, but they’d also be missing out on a lovely, odd experience.
‘The Devil Is Busy’
Move over Michael Curtiz and Steven Soderbergh, because there’s a new filmmaker who’s nominated for two different movies in the same year: Geeta Gandbhir, who directed the Best Documentary Feature nominee “The Perfect Neighbor,” also co-directed the documentary short “The Devil Is Busy” along with Christalyn Hampton.
“The Devil Is Busy” focuses on one day at an abortion clinic in Atlanta, GA in the wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. As doctors wrestle with the increasingly unreasonable demands on women’s health care, the support staff is forced to turn away patients who didn’t know they were pregnant within the incredibly short time they’re allowed to have an abortion, sometimes missing the cutoff by just one day. Also there are right-wing protestors droning incessantly in the background, repeatedly loudly that everyone in this film is going to hell.
Gandbhir and Hampton give the audience a mostly fly-on-the-wall perspective of people trying to do the right thing while the devils, so to speak, tear women down, deny vital health care and use religion as a cudgel. And because these doctors, security guards and office workers keep soldiering on, themselves still reeling from the fact that their daughters have fewer rights now than women did decades ago, this candid approach is all we need. “The Devil Is Busy” is an unassuming, morally complex look at people who care about others and wrestle with difficult moral and ethical questions… the devils be damned.
‘Armed With Only a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud’
Brent Renaud was an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist who spent his life rushing into disasters and war zones, capturing the human toll of each crisis. He was killed in 2022 by Russian soldiers, shot in the back while filming an evacuation in Ukraine. “Armed With Only a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud” is his cinematic eulogy.
It’s an ode, as well, to photojournalists all over the world, but more specifically it’s a memorial to Renaud, a man who felt more comfortable in an earthquake than at a party. We get to know him, thanks to footage shot by Renaud himself. (Brent’s brother directed this documentary after his passing, but Brent is credited too.) So just in case you weren’t gut-punched by footage of his dead body, which Craig Renaud films because he thinks that’s what Brent would do, we also see him dancing and playing with his dog, which obviously makes the grief even more palpable to the strangers in the audience. If it wasn’t a true story, one might even think this was cheap shot — but it is a true story, and the overwhelming sadness isn’t ignored.
As an ode to a fallen journalist, “Armed With Only a Camera” accomplishes the important goal of introducing us to Brent Renaud, making us care about him as a human being, and helping us understand the impact of his work. The film is sad. That is the film’s responsibility, and Craig Renaud makes it our responsibility to not look away.
‘All the Empty Rooms’
Steve Hartman is a broadcast journalist who had, for better or worse, found his niche. He was the guy who gave audiences a light-hearted story or a comforting take on current events, in contrast with the rest of the program. But as incidents of school shootings rose, alarmingly, over the last 30 years, it somehow became his job to do an essay about these tragedies, every week, in the hopes of finding and offering comfort. The problem is he was talking about school shootings, all the time, So there wasn’t much comfort to find. After a while his work became repetitive and, he feared, ineffectual.
“All the Empty Rooms” documents the final days of a 7-year project Hartman undertook, along with photographer Lou Bopp, to record the bedrooms of slain schoolchildren whose parents preserved their space as memorials. Filmmaker Joshua Seftel follows Hartman and Bopp through the last three bedrooms of their journey, interviewing families who lost their loved ones years ago, and still live with their grief, very literally.
Seftel’s film captures the sad poetry of Hartman and Bopp’s work, and unlike many of the other Oscar-nominated short docs this year, “All the Empty Rooms” has something resembling a conventional dramatic arc. Hartman’s career had hardly, it seemed, set him up to tackle a topic of this magnitude, with this much power and significance, and this particular story has now given his career deeper meaning.
It’s not self-congratulatory — that would be repugnant, so don’t worry, the focus is still the children and their families — but Hartman is on a journey, and that journey changed him and his photographer. Bopp takes pictures of his daughter every morning, ostensibly to watch her grow, but in this context we see the darker picture, of a parent who realizes that every day with their child might realistically be the last. So he wants to record every happy moment of their lives. No matter how mundane. Just in case.
‘Children No More: ‘Were and Are Gone’’
Documenting a crisis like the Palestinian genocide is fraught, and that’s not just a description of this documentary . It also describes what director Hilla Medalia is documenting, as she points her camera at activists in Tel Aviv who hold silent vigils, holding up photos of the children who have been killed, only for those deaths to elicit little or no sympathy from passers-by. Towards the start of the film 17,921 children are dead, and the death toll grows steadily as the days go on. Medalia doesn’t have to emphasize that: It’s horrible enough to hear the number “17,921” and sit helplessly while that number repeatedly rises every time the topic comes up.
These vigils are a stark contrast to the many, larger and louder protests about the ongoing hostage crisis, which has broader public support. The activists Medalia films in “Children No More” see no conflict between these two groups, and frequently debate how they can unite the two movements. But the majority of the film is the footage of the protests, as the pedestrians either ignore them, offer a passing glance or, frequently, yell that raising awareness of dead children is heartless and misguided.
The quietude of Hilla Medalia’s documentary is sometimes its undoing, since the movie never quite finds a natural conclusion. Then again, the crisis is still ongoing and even the search for moral context remains somehow controversial. One of the film’s subjects says that “It will take generations to understand the denial we’re in.” When that day comes, docs like “Children No More: Were and Are Gone” will illuminate the shocking mentalities of this era, and depict humanity itself as a work in progress.
