The Oscar-Nominated Documentary Shorts

The last of the shorts categories to run down is the heftiest.  While the live-action and animated contenders usually use only a fraction of their allowed runtimes, the docs tend to use every minute they can, though this year is an exception.  Still, these five films - as is the case with the other shorts programs - rival their feature-length brethren in sheer emotional wallop, if not necessarily in "importance."  What I love about this year's batch of documentary short nominees is how intimate they are, sometimes uncomfortably so; this is a powerful group of nominees, and any of them would be a worthy winner.

First up is J. Christian Jensen's White Earth, named for the North Dakota town to which thousands flock in hopes of finding the bleak remnants of the American Dream - a chance to provide for their families despite the harsh, wintry locale.

The film calls to mind a couple of last year's standout feature-length docs - namely, The Overnighters and Rich Hill - and perhaps that's why it feels almost like a tease.  It's a well-crafted film, chronicling life in the town from the perspective of the children (and an immigrant mother) who live there, uprooted in the hopes of oil bringing economic prosperity to their struggling families.  But because these topics have recently been touched on in other films, White Earth makes us want more information, more time in the town, more insight into these lives, the motivations, the impossibilities.

Of course, the timing of its release is not White Earth's fault, and it offers characters and situations all its own.  It's a small but affecting portrait of what childhood looks like for some kids, what parenthood looks like for some adults, and what life consists of for a swathe of humanity who go where the work is, desperate for a chance to get by and, if luck is on their side, thrive.

This year's frontrunner in the category must be Ellen Goosenberg Kent's Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, which is exactly represented by its title.  The film (which is available to stream for HBOGO users) chronicles the daily work of an upstate New York crisis hotline that, yes, specializes in helping veterans, many of whom are suffering from PTSD or are on the verge of suicide.

I've rarely seen a film so tense, all the more so because it's true.  The efforts of these employees, many of them veterans themselves, are a wonder to behold.  They are consummate professionals, emotionally tactful, strong and sturdy even when dealing with calls that would send most of us into the corner bawling.  The film notes that more military personnel have died by their own hand since 2001 than in combat, a staggering statistic that reveals how heavily our men and women in uniform carry what they see and do while on tour.  The importance of the work done at the Veterans Crisis Line, which is open 24/7/365 is impossible to capture in words, but Kent's film does a great job of letting viewers know.

The film least likely to take the prize this year is Gabriel Serra's The Reaper (La Parka), not because it's undeserving, but because it is so tough to watch.  The eponymous nickname belongs to Efrain, a worker in a slaughterhouse who has been at his job for decades, doing the bloody, brutal work that the weak-stomached couldn't handle.  Efrain's reflections on his work, what it means to him and his family, are as haunting as the images, which will send vegetarians running to the hills.  But the film is absolutely gorgeous to behold, an ironic pairing of beautiful cinematography with ghastly images.  The Reaper is to slaughterhouses as Leviathan was to fishing boats a couple years ago; it drops us squarely into these violent, previously unknowable spaces, and dares us to find the humanity in the bigger killing machine.

The last two nominees serve as gut-renching counterparts.  Aneta Kopacz's Joanna is about as moving as movies get.  When Joanna is diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only months to live, she decides to live out her days joyfully, with her family, and to write to her five year-old son Jas, so he is not left completely without her when she is gone.

The film is tender and generous, with Kopacz giving the family its space while still capturing its pathos.  It's a hard line to discern, but Kopacz does.  The film becomes an extension of Joanna's quest, a time capsule of her precious days and her often funny interactions with Jas, who is as intelligent and witty a child as I've ever seen.  One scene in particular, in which the dialogue is left unheard, presumably finds Joanna informing Jas either of her diagnosis, or of the severity of the timeline, and it is among the most heartbreaking images ever captured on film.  It's an example of Kopacz's intuition as a filmmaker, a chronicler of familial love, and a respectful documentarian of a remarkable woman's last days.

Tomasz Sliwinski's pointedly titled Our Curse is almost the inverse of Joanna.  It shows the struggles of new parents who have just brought home their newborn child, who is diagnosed with a breathing disorder and is, as a result, almost always attached to a breathing apparatus.  The noises of that machine become the inescapable background noise of the film, haunting the viewer within minutes, and the parents, so much more.

Our Curse is basically a video journal, the young couple smoking and talking about their worries, wondering what their lives might look like, finding the pockets of joy when they can.  The film can be tough to watch, especially as they fumble to change a tube or adaptor of some sort on their little one, the expected infant cries replaced by unsettling wheezing gasps.  The film's long takes trap us briefly in the world of eternal parental worry, making one wonder what life is going to look like for this family, each member embarking on a new and scary life that will be marked by hardship and pain, but also the incomparable joy of loving and being loved.

As is often the case in these specialty categories, the one that pulls the most heartstrings is the most likely to win.  This year, that could spell victory for Joanna, Our Curse, or Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1, but I'm putting my money on the latter to pull through, while personally cheering for Joanna.