OSCAR SHORTS at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King West) from Friday (February 10). See listing. Rating: NNNN
Every year, thousands of Oscar pools are screwed by a lack of familiarity with the short-film categories. It’s not enough to look for the most upbeat title any more now that AMPAS requires members to watch all five films before voting, you actually have to consider content, theme and presentation before picking a winner.
Fortunately, TIFF has you covered. In what’s become a nice little tradition, all 15 of this year’s nominated shorts will be screened at the Lightbox, arranged by program.
As always, it’s a wide mix of polished calling cards, rough-hewn art and genuine inspiration, and the anthology nature of each program means that if you aren’t totally connecting to a given short, it’ll be over before too long. That said, it’s a pretty strong package overall, as you’d expect from a lineup of Oscar nominees.
This year’s animation lineup is more experimental than usual. Theodore Ushev’s Blind Vaysha – one of two Canadian productions that made the cut this year, along with Robert Valley’s Pear Brandy And Cigarettes, a UK co-production – unfolds a nifty split-screen narrative, while Pearl is the first Oscar nominee designed for virtual-reality presentation. It plays just fine in 2D, though – and it’s my pick for your Oscar pool. Director Patrick Osborne won the prize two years ago for his delightful Feast, and this year he raises his technological game without losing any of his warmth or vision.
The inventive Timecode is a live-action program highlight.
Live-action highlights include Selim Azzazi’s tense interrogation-room drama Enemies Within, and Juanjo Giminez Pena’s inventive, playful Timecode, though Aske Bang’s Silent Nights, a Danish drama about the romance between a Ghanaian refugee (Prince Yaw Appiah) and a shelter worker (Malene Beltoft Olsen) feels like this year’s winner, both for its subject matter and its subtle but sophisticated visual approach.
At press time, the documentary program was on hold due to a distribution issue, but four of the five contenders are viewable at home: Dan Krauss’s Extremis and Orlando von Einseidel’s The White Helmets are both on Netflix, and Daphne Matziaraki’s 4.1 Miles is streaming at the New York Times.
You can find Kahane Cooperman’s Joe’s Violin at the New Yorker’s Screening Room, and that one feels like the winner. It ticks every box on the Academy’s checklist (refugees, music, education, art, an elderly subject, the Holocaust) while never making that combination feel calculated the result is a moving, joyful story of human connection.
Which is exactly what the Oscars are supposed to celebrate.
