The short film, in all its glory, will be back at Memorial Hall this Saturday and Sunday when Cincinnati World Cinema presents this year’s package of Oscar-nominated Live Action and Animated Shorts. Earlier, it had screened Oscar-nominated Documentary Shorts.
Forget the small matter of winners and losers at the Academy Awards. We’re the beneficiaries of this bountiful crop of filmmaking, which easily rivals the narratives found on the feature slate.
On the animated front, despite the presence of Piper, a Pixar selection audiences will likely recall, it is time we acknowledge that this format doesn’t have to cater strictly to the kid-centric family-friendly crowd. There is a rich maturity in titles like Borrowed Time, a Western tale about a tragic event in the early years of a lawman;Pearl, a moving musical ode to a father-daughter relationship that could give La La Land a run for its money; and Blind Vaysha, a fable about a girl with one eye that sees only the past, while the other eye sees nothing but the future. But the showstopper might be Pear Cider and Cigarettes, which tells a rambling Rock-noirish story about the life and times of a legendary figure. In its hand-drawn glory, Pear Cider and Cigarettes captures the hazy feel of bingeing on sex, drugs and fantasy that puts adults back in touch with their wild youth.
The live-action nominees traffic in global experiences, with a willingness to drift into the surreal. Two films — Silent Nights andEnnemis Intérieurs (Enemies Within) — tackle immigration head-on. Sing, the story of a new student who joins a children’s choir and helps to upend an authoritarian choral director, goes for the heartstrings in the broadest sense. Along similar lines, La Femme et le TGV follows an aging baker who engages in a daily correspondence with a passenger on a train, but injects the tale with a sense of whimsy.
My favorite, though, is Timecode, from Spanish director Juanjo Giménez Peña, which uses motion and dance to establish connections in lonely times, but playfully tips its hat to the Netflix series The OA. For information, visit memorialhallotr.org or cincyworldcinema.org. Grade: A
This article appears in Mar 8-15, 2017.
