End of the Century (Free screening)
Wrapping up a weekend of free screenings marking the end of PRIDE month, I am absolutely thrilled to show one of my favorite films of the past five years. Sexy, funny, beautifully constructed, and sneakily profound, Lucio Castro’s End of the Century is a slight stunner that I tend to describe as “a lightly metaphysical gay Before Sunrise,” about an Argentine poet and a Berlin-based Spaniard who eventually meet after a series of missed connections in Barcelona. The film’s first act traces their hookup in a manner that’s simultaneously mundane and filled with lust and longing, and from here Castro gently sends these two men through time in a manner I’m loathe to spoil. Suffice it to say that in this stunningly assured debut film, Castro is investigating the idea of fate in a manner that’s at once playful and a bit of a head trip. End of the Century also boasts one of the all-time great jump scares, revealing its most pivotal twist with an unexpected burst of noise. Released to great reviews in 2019, End of the Century never traveled too far and as far as I’m aware it’s never been available to subscribers of any major screening service, which in the present day might as well condemn a film to obscurity. It deserves to join the queer canon.
The Queen (Free screening)
A landmark film that predates the Stonewall rebellion and establishes an observational, process-based documentary rhythm that many associate with Frederick Wiseman, Frank Simon’s documentary The Queen was released to polite notices in 1968 (the author and then-film critic Renata Adler raved about it in the New York Times) and then broadly forgotten until about a decade ago, when successful repertory screenings paved the way to Kino Lorber’s recent restoration of the film. Shot a generation before Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, The Queen is a surprising document of a moment where drag performances were technically criminal acts yet seemingly uncontroversial. The show depicted here is a benefit held in a Manhattan hotel, but the lack of glitz in its setting suits Simon’s purposes (building rich characters through practical scenes) perfectly.
Light Attaching to a Girl (with filmmaker Laina Barakat)
New Hampshire-based filmmaker Laina Barakat joins us this Friday to wrap up a tour of her striking and sensitive medium-length coming of age film, Light Attaching to a Girl. Filmed with non-actors and essentially an outline of a script, allowing the actors to add their own feelings and experience to the process, the film is keenly attuned to the suffocations of small-town life and the weight of the decision to strike out on one’s own. Barakat’s own sister, Clare, gives a lovely lead performance in the film, shining once her character sets out to Iceland to discover how she interacts with the wider world.
The Watermelon Woman (Free screening)
Playing in repertory with Losing Ground throughout the weekend is The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye’s groundbreaking, spry, and intellectually curious mock documentary. As a version of herself, Dunye portrays a video store clerk and spiring filmmaker working on a documentary about the titular Watermelon Woman, an actress credited as such in early Hollywood films, where she typically played so-called “mammy” roles. (The actress is fictitious, but Dunye so effectively frames the actress in a historical and academic reality that you wouldn’t know it to watch the film.) Simultaneously, Dunye gets involved with a white customer frequenting her video store. The Watermelon Woman oscillates beautifully between moments of romance and humor and a more earnest examination of historical oppression, resulting in a film that sometimes exists on the wavelength of 1990s slacker comedies but has the rigor and boldness of other gems from the New Queer Cinema.
Losing Ground (Free screening)
In commemoration of Juneteenth, we’re hosting the second installment of an annual film series, “Connection and Collaboration.” Programmed in partnership with Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film and Screen Studies and Africana at Bates College, films in this series examine and celebrate the ways African Americans collaborate across their differences for their survival. 1982’s Losing Ground, one of just two films by the late, celebrated poet, playwright, and activist Kathleen Collins, explores the tensions between an ambitious professor of philosophy (Seret Scott) and her more sybaritic artist husband, played by Bill Gunn (director of Ganja & Hess and the great recent rediscovery Personal Problems). I last saw Losing Ground in the first wave of its recent canonization as a film print toured repertory houses around 2016, and remain struck by its striking editing rhythms and singular exploration of personal pleasure and partnership. We’ll be showing Kino Lorber’s recent restoration of the film.
Maine Mayhem Film Festival
After a sold-out premiere at the Nickelodeon last month, we’re happy to bring the Maine Mayhem Film Festival to PMA Films for a free encore presentation. This is an annual showcase of short films (both animated and not) by second year students in Southern Maine Community College’s Communications and New Media program. Some of this year’s filmmakers will be in attendance for the program, and we’ll have a Q&A with them after we screen the program, which will run for two hours.
Chile ‘76
A tense political thriller about a well-heeled, accidental revolutionary, Chile ‘76 is an intimate and striking period piece. Aline Kuppenheim stars as Carmen, the wife of a hospital director on a prolonged winter vacation on the Chilean coast. While monitoring the renovation of her home and taking time outs to host her grandchildren and perform service for her church, Carmen finds herself acquainted with a young leftist in need, engaging in small gestures of empathy and charity that can be interpreted as risky political acts. With her debut directorial feature, Manuel Martelli acquits herself beautifully. Aesthetically, the filmmaker has a real way with visual motifs and quietly symbolic colors, costumes, and settings. It’s one of the more fully realized debuts I’ve seen in quite some time.
The Eight Mountains
A film of epic sweep and panoramic vistas, Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeesch’s The Eight Mountains is the rare work that focuses its attention on the oscillations of a friendship across the decades. For a medium built around conflict and juxtaposition, friendship has always felt to me like one of the most underexplored subjects in cinema, and it’s extremely gratifying to see it conveyed with the realism and complexity van Groeningen and Vandermeesch deploy here. The Eight Mountains spans four decades, beginning in the childhood of Pietro and Bruno, portrayed as children by Lupo Barbiero and Cristiano Sassella and as adults by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi. At first, the two drum up a companionship wrought by proximity, as Pietro spends his summers in a dazzling small town in the Italian Alps. In adulthood, the film examines the two at varying crossroads, in every instance trying to recapture the freedom they felt as children. Based on a book of the same name by Paolo Cognetti, The Eight Mountains is highly attuned to the obligations, responsibilities, and emotional ups and downs that invisibly carve the trajectory of our most important relationships. Both Borghi (a big-hearted force of nature) and Marinelli (a cerebral, searching presence delivering another great performance after his titanic work in 2020’s Martin Eden) are entirely in tune with their characters; you get the sense that they both always know what is unsaid between them, and this lends the film a gentle but considerable tension. If the massive, screen-swallowing landscapes of The Eight Mountains are enough to recommend the film, its unexpectedly trenchant examination of masculinity is a welcome bonus.
Honest Vision: A Portrait of Todd Webb (with Director Huey)
This award-winning documentary chronicles the life and career of Todd Webb (1905-2000), one of America’s important 20th century photographers. The photographer’s life is told through the wit and stories of Webb himself. Featured are Webb’s elegant black and white photographs of Paris and New York in the 1940s and 1950s, and his photographs of the American West taken from 1955-65 when he retraced the Gold Rush Trails by foot, by bicycle, and by motor scooter. Honest Vision also is the love story of Todd and Lucille Webb. An inseparable team, the interviews with Lucille Webb give an insight to the influence a partner has on the creative life of an artist.
Showing Up
The most warmly reviewed film of the year so far, Showing Up is another sneakily profound comedy of manners and power from Kelly Reichardt, who by this point is indisputably one of the great American filmmakers. Reichardt’s staggeringly consistent body of work can vary greatly in tone, from the Bressonian neorealism of 2008’s Wendy and Lucy to 2020’s terrific First Cow, a bromance and entrepreneurial fable set in the expanding and colonizing American west. Showing Up, by contrast, feels very close to home for Reichardt, setting its gaze on an insular community of Portland, Oregon artmakers, particularly one who simultaneously spurns attention and seems to feel like she’s not getting her due. Michelle Williams, Reichardt’s most esteemed on-screen collaborator, walks a delicate balance here. Her Lizzy is persnickety, relatable, humble, and genuinely aggrieved as she hustles to finish pieces for an upcoming gallery show. She is particularly taxed by her landlord Jo (Hong Chau), a more successful artist obliviously holding Lizzy’s sanity hostage by way of a string of minor impositions and Lizzy’s long-busted water heater. This conflict, familiar and thus hugely potent, embodies the tangle of ideas about creativity, personal boundaries, and empathy that sprout up elsewhere in Showing Up, as the film expands its purview to an art school, Lizzy’s family, and her climactic opening party. Reichardt’s film is proof positive that art achieves the universal when it dwells on details and psychological complexity.
“Inside/Outside”: Short Films by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra
A trailblazer of sub-Saharan African cinema, Vieyra’s interest in cinema, history, and lived experience of Africans is in abundant display in this selection of his short films. Born in Benin and later based in Senegal, Vieyra was one of the first Black Africans to direct a film, Africa on the Seine, a moving and thoughtful documentary about young Africans studying in Paris. His later works included Lamb, a revelatory and stirring study of beachside Senegalese wrestling, and Behind the Scenes: The Making of “Ceddo,” a firsthand document from the set of Ousmane Sembène’s revolutionary classic. In addition to his filmmaking, Vieyra was founder of the Fédération Panafricaine des Cinéastes and a crucial mentor to key filmmaking figures like Sembène, Djibril Diop Mambéty, and Ababacar Samb-Makharam.
Hilma
Directed by Lasse Hallström (My Life as a Dog, The Cider House Rules), Hilma is a timely biopic of one of the most important artistic rediscoveries of the past decade. Hilma explores af Klint’s spiritualism, her unconventional love life, and the impetus behind her work — from the writings of Rudolph Steiner to the strong influence of the Theosophic Movement, and her belief in its mystical philosophy — in a portrait of a woman well ahead of her time.
“Inside/Outside”: Black Girl + Jojolo
Two of the highlights of our ongoing series “Inside/Outside,” a set of films in dialogue with our current exhibit, “Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa,” Jojolo and Black Girl offer contrasting views of a woman’s relocation to France: the former is an effervescent and stylish short, while the latter is a concise and totemic work of anti-colonial filmmaking by one of Africa’s greatest filmmakers, Ousmane Sembène.
No One Told Me (with director Zulilah Merry)
An intimate and intuitively sensitive look at the postpartum experience, Zulilah Merry’s hour-long documentary follows one couple through the ups and downs of their experience as new parents. We are honored to welcome the filmmaker for a Mother’s Day weekend screening of her film, which will culminate in a panel discussion with local caregivers.
R.M.N.
Perhaps the greatest filmmaker of the so-called “Romanian New Wave” that took the film world by storm around the release of 2007’s stark and masterful abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu has continued to explore social issues that speak both to his home country and a broader, globalizing world. R.M.N., a brilliantly orchestrated and pointedly ambiguous treatise about ethnicity and immigration in an unsparing modern economy, is Mungiu’s most urgent and fraught statement to date. The film establishes a constellation of seemingly individual dramas in its first hour, some involving Matthias (Marin Grigore), a factory worker who leaves a job in Germany to return home to his family. Others are related to this Transylvanian village’s local bakery, which is at once the only reliable source of employment in the village and a business that (beholden to industry cost standards) can only afford to pay its workers minimum wage. Tensions simmer with the arrival of a pair of workers from Sri Lanka, and come to a stunning boil in the film’s final hour, which is highlighted by a stunning 18-minute single-take town meeting and one of the best final scenes of a movie in recent memory.
“Inside/Outside”: First World Festival of Negro Arts + African Rhythmus
I spent a good chunk of February watching a set of films supplied to me by the team at African Film Festival, Inc. in order to plan a film series that reflected on the themes of our ongoing exhibition, “Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa.” I’m excited to begin this series, titled “Inside/Outside,” with two rare medium-length documentaries that observe 1966’s First World Festival of African Art from very different perspectives. The first, an official portrait of the festival directed by the massively important American independent filmmaker William Greaves (Nationtime, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One), is an unfettered reverie, while African Rhythmus can’t help but come off as a work by a Soviet Union hoping to increase its cultural and geopolitical influence on a new continent in the midst of dramatic change. The two films stand in striking, fascinating contrast while ostensibly documenting the same event.
Return to Seoul
One of my favorite films of the young year, Return to Seoul is a Korean-set drama that couldn’t be much different from Walk Up. Stylish, tumultuous, and altogether riveting, the film (directed by the Cambodian-French filmmaker Davy Chou) is shaped around an incredible, dynamic performance by Park Ji-Min. She plays Freddie, a French woman born in South Korea but adopted early in life. Freddie travels to Seoul to visit friends, but one of the tantalizing tricks of Chou’s film is how he and Park cultivate an ambiguity about Freddie’s attitude and motives at any given moment. Her journey is wholly unpredictable, perhaps because she has arrived in Seoul without a plan, but maybe because she has very concrete intentions and isn’t sure if she wants to follow through with them. Freddie remains a mystery for much of the film—she is, at various times, magnetic, diffident, and vulnerable—but she’s never anything less than mesmerizing.
The closer we get to Freddie, the more Chou challenges the viewer to question their assumptions. Return to Seoul is a film that isn’t reluctant to turn in surprising directions, and these decisions do a great deal to illuminate its protagonist, whose sense of dislocation turns out to be the movie’s primary concern.
Exhibition on Screen: Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition
An audience favorite, the stalwart Exhibition on Screen series returns with a comprehensive portrait of the blockbuster survey of the Dutch Baroque painter, currently on view at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. With loans from across the world, this major retrospective will bring together Vermeer’s most famous masterpieces including Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Geographer, The Milkmaid, The Little Street, Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid, and Woman Holding a Balance.
This new Exhibition on Screen film invites audiences to a private view of the exhibition, accompanied by the director of the Rijksmuseum and the curators of the show. A truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! As well as bringing Vermeer’s works together, both the Rijksmuseum and the Mauritshuis in the Hague have conducted research into Vermeer’s artistry, his artistic choices and motivations for his compositions, as well as the creative process behind his paintings.
Walk Up
The prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo is back with his fourth (!) film released stateside in the past two years. Distinct from last year’s lovely The Novelist’s Film, Walk Up marks a return to the director’s quietly playful mode of structural experimentation. Here, the great Kwon Hae-hyo plays a director who takes his now working-age daughter (Park Mi-so), an aspiring interior designer, to visit the home of an old friend (Lee Hye-young, terrific) who is a great success in the industry. They tour the building (which contains multiple apartments and a restaurant) and sit down for a long and increasingly boozy conversation that’s captured in one remarkable take. This is something of a calling card for Hong, but what transpires afterward is quite new, as the progression to new areas of the building create tectonic shifts in the relationships between Walk Up’s four major characters.
One Fine Morning
Mia Hansen-Løve, the great French director whose last film, Bergman Island, screened here in 2021, makes drama from the stuff of life and the mind. Few directors pay such keen attention to the bookshelves of their characters, and fewer still are interested in how people live their interests and values. Hansen-Løve has explored this territory through the eyes of young lovers (2011’s Goodbye, First Love), a professor engaging with her younger and more radical students (2016’s Things to Come), and 2014’s remarkable Eden, a pseudo-epic about an unsuccessful DJ’s experience riding the coattails of the ascent of electronic music.
In One Fine Morning, Hansen-Løve explores aging through a few different lenses. Sandra (Léa Seydoux, luxuriating in an uncharacteristically modest role) is a translator and single mother nearing middle age who has no time for dating. Her father (Pascal Greggory), is a retired professor suffering from a rapidly advancing neurodegenerative illness. Her daughter (Camille Leban Martins) is developing her own opinions, and occupies the only bedroom in their handsome but tiny apartment. And an old friend, Clément (Melvil Poupaud), reappears in her life, willing to risk his marriage for Sandra. Hansen-Løve navigates these dilemmas, all of which feel at once prosaic and weighty, with a dramaturgical and intellectual rigor that is characteristically elegant and tinged with autobiographical weight.
Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Caro (Power Broker, The Years of Lyndon Johnson) and legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, have worked and fought together for 50 years, forging one of publishing’s most iconic and productive partnerships. Caro’s The Power Broker, edited by Gottlieb continues to be a bestseller after 48 years. Now 87, Caro is working to complete the fifth and final volume of his masterwork, The Years of Lyndon Johnson; Gottlieb, 91, waits to edit it. The task of finishing their life’s work looms before them.
Directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, Turn Every Page explores their remarkable creative collaboration, including the behind-the-scenes drama of the making of Caro’s The Power Broker and the LBJ series. With humor and insight, this unique double portrait reveals the work habits, peculiarities and professional joys of these two ferocious intellects. It arrives at the culmination of a journey that has consumed both their lives and impacted generations of politicians, activists, writers and readers, and furthered our understanding of power and democracy.
Guerilla Opera’s I Give You My Home
For 2023’s Art in Bloom, we’re thrilled to present a premiere screening run of I Give You My Home, a 37-minute opera film based on the life of Rachel Standish Nichols. Guerilla Opera, the enterprising Boston opera company, will be on site with a merch table at most screenings, and select screenings will feature conversations with composer Beth Wiemann. Linda Marshall of the Nichols House Museum will join Wiemann for an event on Friday, March 31 at 6 pm.
Guerilla Opera presents I Give You My Home, a world premiere opera film inspired by the Nichols House Museum in Boston and the life of Rose Standish Nichols (1872–1960). The opera explores the life of the Bostonian women’s peace party and suffrage activist, professional landscape architect, and published author and brings to light efforts to affect change.
Her efforts are important and striking for their persistence in spite of the barriers, and she inspires future generations to pursue their unique passions and make an impact on their own terms.
I Give You My Home features music and original libretto by local composer Beth Wiemann and is brought to life by the acclaimed filmmaker, Cara Consilvio.
My Name Is Andrea (with Maine Jewish Film Festival and Through These Doors)
My Name Is Andrea is a hybrid feature documentary about one of the most controversial figures of the 20th century. Andrea Dworkin offered a revolutionary analysis of male supremacy with a singular urgency and iconoclastic flair. Decades before #MeToo, Dworkin called out the pervasiveness of sexism and rape culture, and the ways it impacts every woman’s daily life. Shaped by the values of justice and equality learned in the civil rights movement, the film focuses on key moments from the life of this fearless fighter who demanded that women be seen as fully human. The film features performances by Ashley Judd, Soko, Amandla Stenberg, Andrea Riseborough, and Christine Lahti, woven in with rare, electrifying archival footage of Dworkin.
We are presenting this film in partnership with Maine Jewish Film Festival, who will conclude the film with a conversation with Rebecca Hobbs, Executive Director of Through These Doors, a domestic violence resource center in Cumberland County.
Full Time
Éric Gravel’s riveting and nerve-shredding drama Full Time is one of my early favorites of 2023. Propelled by an unvarnished and exquisite lead performance by Laure Calamy (Call My Agent!) and some truly muscular filmmaking – this is practically the Uncut Gems of films about French transit strikes – Gravel’s film is well-timed for yet another moment of widespread protests and disruptions in French society. Calamy plays Julie, a single mother working well outside of Parisian metropolitan borders in order to keep a supervisory position in housekeeping at a five-star hotel in the city. As travel delays into and out of Paris become more extreme, and as Julie searches for work more in line with her credentials, her position becomes increasingly untenable. It remains too rare for films to address the conditions of labor in the service industry, and Gravel keenly expresses this lifestyle in the form of a thriller. The impossible, contradictory demands Julie navigates (managing money, childcare, and co-workers) make this genre framing feel utterly appropriate. It’s a terrific film.
Close
We are officially wrapping up Oscar season here at PMA Films, and doing so in rather devastating fashion with Lukas Dhont’s widely acclaimed Belgian coming-of-age story Close, winner of the Grand Jury Prize (second place) at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and a nominee for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards. Eden Dambrine and Gustav de Waele, two extraordinarily present young actors, star as thirteen year-old Léo and Rémi, inseparable best friends who have just begun high school. Their uncommonly intimate bond becomes the subject of speculation among their classmates, which gradually alters the boys’ relationship, leading to a devastating tragedy. Dhont, working in a mode quite similar to his compatriots Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (Two Days, One Night), is highly attentive to physical proximity and the remarkable nuance of his young actors, effortlessly drawing the viewer deep into the dynamics of Léo and Rémi’s relationship. When it changes fundamentally, the film is unflinching in its impression of the emotional consequences. Close is not an easy watch, but it is ultimately a cathartic one, rendered with surprising honesty.
Dark Nights Golden Days (with Oshima Brothers)
We’ll be trying something a little different for our matinee screening on March 12, when the esteemed Maine indie duo Oshima Brothers present their new film/visual album, Dark Nights Golden Days. You can expect to hear about how they made this 45-minute film from scratch, watch the film, see humorous behind-the-scenes footage, join in for a Q & A and hear a few songs from the brothers live. It will be a one-of-a-kind afternoon.
In their first self-directed film, Dark Nights Golden Days, Oshima Brothers tell the story of their lives as artists and siblings. They depict a world torn apart by climate change that’s consoled by people and art. The film is a visual album that pairs with the sequence of their new record, Dark Nights Golden Days. Sean and Jamie explore the joys of the nature (rivers and coasts, mountain tops and horizon lines, wildflowers and wilderness) that they enjoyed growing up in Maine. The visual album dances between themes of addiction to technology, lost love, climate change, and life’s many simple pleasures. The film welcomes viewers into the deep imagination of the band, mixing gorgeous northern drone footage with green screen action scenes built into 3D animated spaces and scenes from around New England.
The Maine-based indie duo released their 17-track album Dark Nights Golden Days in spring of 2022. Music has always been a central part of the brothers’ lives but for the past decade so too has filmmaking, having already created over 30 of their own official music videos.
On Dark Nights Golden Days the brothers have crafted a richly layered sound that is at once retro and metro, spacious and intimate, lush and loud. The music very much reflects the duo’s DIY approach. Sean and Jamie wrote and sang all the songs and played nearly all the instruments, and Jamie also produced, recorded, and mixed the album. During the filming process Jamie directed, edited, filmed, and produced while Sean focused on casting, costuming, choreography, and filming
The Quiet Girl
Pretty much every Oscar season there is one nominee for Best International Feature that, by dint of the release schedule or a lack of critical attention, comes as a minor shock to the awards pundit class. This year that surprise is Colm Bairéad’s Irish-language coming-of-age film The Quiet Girl, which alongside EO is the strongest film in the category. In her debut film performance, Catherine Clinch stars as Cáit, the most solemn member of a growing, impoverished family who is sent to live with her aunt and uncle for the summer as her family awaits the birth of a new child. What transpires from there is pretty simple: a gentle thaw of relations and identity, but one conveyed with such specificity that it’s impossible to come away from The Quiet Girl unmoved. The film is Bairéad’s debut feature, though you wouldn’t know it from his precise and preternaturally elegant imagery and control of tone. While it’s not an entirely uplifting story, I think audiences will cherish this film.
2023 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Live Action
Wrapping up our screenings of this year’s Oscar nominated shorts programs (but not our streak of nominated films!) is the 2023 Live Action shorts program, whose offerings range from a whimsical fairy tale to a taut thriller to a darkly comic family story. The longest, and for me the most noteworthy, film in the lineup is Le pupille, directed by the extraordinary Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. (Her terrific film Happy as Lazzaro is available on Netflix, and she’s contributed top-notch work to HBO’s great, wildly undervalued adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.) Le pupille is set over the holidays at a religious boarding school in Italy, where a series of odd events stirs up the rebellious spirit of the school’s young girls. Other highlights of the program include Eirik Tveiten and Gaute Lid Larssen’s Night Ride, about a Norwegian woman who finds herself in control of her town’s automated tram, and Cyrus Neshvad’s gripping The Red Suitcase, about a teenage Iranian girl’s journey through a Luxembourg airport.
NYICFF Kid Flicks: Celebrating Black Stories (Free Family Day screening)
As part of our Family Day programming on Saturday, February 25, we’re pleased to offer a free screening of the “Celebrating Black Stories” shorts program from the New York International Children’s Film Festival. In these seven films, Black stories take the spotlight to highlight films that share the joy, determination, resilience, and complexity of being Black and young. Explore a range of genres and styles in a program that spans the globe.
2023 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Documentary
By far the longest of this year’s shorts programs, but perhaps its most edifying and eclectic, are the documentary shorts, which dwell on American politics, some very different animal caretakers, and emotional and intellectual evolutions over the course of 2.5+ hours. The program gets the tearjerkers (Jay Rosenblatt’s earnest and affecting How Do You Measure a Year? and Kartiki Gonsalves and Guneet Monga’s The Elephant Whisperers) out of the way first before pivoting to more sober fare. Joshua Seftel and Conall Jones’s is an emotionally risky work of longform journalism examining a would-be domestic terrorist. Haulout, directed by Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev and quite evidently the strongest film of the bunch, so masterfully conceals its subject matter for about five minutes that I’m loathe to spoil the surprise. Wrapping things up is Anne Alvergue and Beth Levison’s The Martha Mitchell Effect, an impressively edited, fully archival dive into the impact of the titular political wife on the Watergate scandal and beyond. (Listeners of the podcast Slow Burn may be familiar with Mitchell’s story, though this short offers a more capacious survey of its subject.)
2023 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Animation
One of our most popular annual programs, we begin our annual screenings of the Oscar nominated shorts this weekend with the very strong animated shorts package, which begins in high, wry style with Lachlan Pendragon’s funny and inventive An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It. Think Being John Malkovich meets The Truman Show and you’re somewhere in the ballpark of this beautiful stop-motion gem. For my money, the peak of the program is the third film, João Gonzalez and Bruno Caetano’s The Ice Merchants, which takes a serene, surreal premise and executes it with a stunning mix of beauty and tension, masterfully meting out information and landing on an exquisite final image. Also of note is the one short in the program which is decidedly not suitable for children, Sara Gunnarsdóttir and Pamela Ribon’s My Year of Dicks, which chronicles a high school girl’s dynamic coming-of-age with an aptly eclectic, almost zine-like animation style and no shortage of trenchant wit.
