This year’s batch of Academy Award winners may have been unveiled earlier this month, but moviegoers still have a chance to see 2020’s Oscar-nominated short films made larger than life on the Garfield Theatre’s silver screen.
This marks Cincinnati World Cinema’s 19th consecutive year of hosting the event and the first in their new 719 Race St. theater space. While the documentary shorts screened there earlier this year, the live-action and animated nominees will be spread across two weeks starting March 6 and running through March 15, with eight days total of showtimes. (This is expanded from the single weekend dates in previous years.)
When asked what makes short films unique, as compared to features, CWC’s Tim Swallow says that they have to deliver their hook quickly; they have no time for a fuzzy opening.
“I think that they’re probably more accurate in terms of what’s going on in the world because they come from different countries,” Swallow adds. “They’re not locked into the hype that is so prevalent in the feature films division. If you think about the films that were nominated in the feature division this year, a lot of them were almost casually dismissed as white male rage, or, more politely put, white men in crisis.
“And if you look at the themes that are in most of the nominated pictures, that tends to be true. Of course, the exception was Parasite, which shocked a lot of people and I’m thoroughly delighted by it. But everything else was basically an English language picture.”
And, unlike the features division — in which only one female-directed film was nominated for Best Picture out of nine and no woman was nominated for Best Director — the shorts paint a different story: Women comprise 50 percent of the nominated filmmakers in the live action and animated categories.
They also hail from countries across the globe: France, Belgium, China, the Czech Republic, Guatemala and Brotherhood is a polyglot between Tunisia, Canada, Qatar and Sweden.
“The themes that they pursue this year are intriguing in that they’re basically about family relationships, whether it’s siblings or parents or whatever,” Swallow says. “And they’re also expressive of a general element of hope. Which is not a bad thing for the times we live in.”
Here’s a rundown of what to expect in each program block, starting with Program A:
With an 83-minute total run time, Program A consists of all five nominated animated shorts along with four bonus films (Henrietta Bulkowski, The Bird & The Whale, Hors Piste, Maestro).
- First up is Oscar Winner Hair Love. Directed by Matthew Cherry and co-produced with Karen Rupert Toliver, this touching story navigates the relationship between a father and his daughter, Zuri, as he does her hair for the first time. Cherry launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2017 to create a short about a black father learning, after much effort, how to style his young daughter’s hair. It far surpassed its initial goal of $75,000 to score over $300,000 — the highest ever raised for a short film project on the platform.
- Daria Kashcheeva’s stop-motion puppet film also navigates a father-daughter relationship — albeit in a very different vein. Dcera (Daughter) hones in on a young woman who meets her father in a hospital room. She’s taken back to memories of her childhood and the estranged relationship she has with her dad.
- A man recalls his childhood memories of growing up in 1990s china (during the one-child policy) with an annoying sister by his side in Siqi Song’s Sister, a stop-motion film that uses felt.
- Yet another stop-motion film is French short Memorablé. Directed by Bruno Collet and Jean François Le Corre, it weaves the story of a painter, Louis, and his wife, Michelle, as his world is disrupted by strange occurrences in which the furniture, objects and people around him begin to lose their realism.
- Rounding out the nominees is the 2-D animated film Kitbull, an exploration of a strange (and adorable) friendship between a stray kitten and a pitbull.
At a total runtime of 102 minutes, the Live Action nominees showcased in Program B are as follows:
- Directed by Delphine Girard, thriller Une Soeur (A Sister) is told through two women protagonists. Alie is trapped by her abductor, Dary, inside a car hurtling down a dark road when she contacts emergency services in the guise of calling her sister. There, she’s connected with an operator who must try to help her get out of the dire situation.
- When his son returns after years away with a new wife, Mohamed, a shepherd who lives in Tunisia, is shaken and grows suspicious. Meryam Joobeur’s emotional Brotherhood grapples with complex family dynamics.
- Taking home the title of “winner” was Marshall Curry’s The Neighbors’ Window. Alli, a middle-aged mom with young children, finds herself exhausted. Alongside her husband, Jacob, she begins to watch — and be transfixed by — their seemingly carefree 20-something neighbors across the street through their window.
- Bryan Buckley and Matt Lefebvre’s Saria is relayed through two orphaned sisters who are fighting against emotional, physical and sexual abuse at the state-run Virgen de La Asuncion Safe Home in Guatemala. Based on a true story, the film’s events lead up a fire that in 2017 killed 41 of the orphaned girls.
- Closing the selection is Yves Piat’s Nefta Football Club, the tale of two brothers who stumble upon a headphones-wearing-donkey lugging cargo in the desert near their village in Tunisia.
Though most of the films can be found via online streaming, Swallow says that there’s something about the communal experience of seeing them all in one place on the big screen that resonates.
“We’re grateful that so many people come back year after year after year,” Swallow says. “Obviously, it’s something that they love.”
Single advance tickets for both programs are $11 and same-day combo packages are $18. To buy tickets, visit cincyworldcinema.org or call 859-957-3456.
This article appears in Feb 19-28, 2020.
