There’s a way to warm up your Academy Awards engine – besides chasing down high profile showings of actors and films nominated in the major categories. See the short films also nominated for Oscars. No celebrity brouhaha required. Continuing its tradition of bringing you this little indulged appreciation for filmmaking, the Nevada Theatre film series gives a Sunday, each at 7pm, to Documentary Shorts (2/14), Animated Shorts (2/07), and the following Live Action Shorts (1/31):
William Wordsworth said, “The child is the father of the man.” In “Shok” (21 minutes), a man gets nudged out of the present. He recalls his childhood and traumatic learnings about friendship, about the way of the world, about the war torn way in which too many children grow up.
An interpreter’s first day on the job in “Day One” (25 minutes) exceeds any scenario you are familiar with. It isn’t just the far away, foreign quagmire that is Afghanistan. So much cross-cultural tension torques the dangerous immediacy. How do people carry on?
In “Ave Maria” (15 minutes), Orthodox Jews literally collide with Christianity, and of all places, in Muslim Palestine. The humorous jostling is as absurd as the strict religious practice, the twitches of righteous insistence, and the way things work out despite.
In “Stutterer” (12 minutes), sweet awkwardness is wallpapered on the story of a man who’s been dating his girlfriend online only. After six months of happy compatibility, there’s a line that it’s time to cross. Will he blow it worrying if he’ll blow it?
In “Everything Will Be OK” (30 minutes), a father and daughter share a day. It’s mundane, and that propels the discomfort that develops. You worry all too readily that it is what you think it is. It’s mundane and that grips your anxiety about how it will be what you know it is.
This year’s Oscar nominated Live Action Shorts meet the film challenge well of telling a compact story. It’s an extension of your movie going self to give these kinds of films a turn.