Documentary Shorts - all nominees

Documentary Short - Ed Perkins and Jonathan Chinn

Black Sheep is the story of Cornelius whose family lived in London until a young boy in their neighborhood was brutally murdered.  His parents get very scared and they move to Essex, a smaller, very white town outside of London.  The locals are not happy to have a black family living among them, and young Cornelius experiences virulent racism including both epithets being hurled at him on a regular basis, and a violent beating for no other reason than he is black.  Over time though, he figures out that all he has to do is fit in with the racists, and finding acceptance overrides his turmoil about their views.  It makes him feel important to know that while this group still hates black people, they have brought him in as an insider.  Most of this film is done through first person storytelling and reenactments.  It is the weakest of the film contenders.

Documentary Short - Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

End Game is a beautiful telling of how medical professionals and their teams help patients and their families through the last stages of life, both through palliative care and hospice.  It is a very hard film to watch because the patients featured in the film know they are going to die, and they are wrestling with how much life extension they should go through via medical treatment that may lengthen the quantity of their days but probably not the quality.  The extraordinary doctors, nurses, social workers, and volunteers in the film are heroes beyond measure.  This is the second of two end of life care documentaries nominated - in 2017 a wonderful documentary short called Extremis also followed patients and their care givers.  While this is not an entirely new subject for the Oscars to deal with, it is an extraordinarily touching film.

Documentary Short - Skye Fitzgerald and Bryn Mooser

Lifeboat is the third Oscar nominated film to focus on the heroic works of boat rescue organizations who literally pull drowning migrants from the Mediterranean sea (the other two are 4.1 miles, a former documentary short nominee, and Fire at Sea, a former full length documentary nominee).  In this film, we see almost 1000 people escaping Syria, Camaroon, Libya and others where the stories of the migrants are heartbreaking.  Primarily people escaping war, human trafficking, indentured servitude, and violent rape, it is hard to think about the politics, the logistics, or any of the noise surrounding people who just want to escape the horrid violence in their lives to any land that will give them opportunity and peace.

Documentary Short - Marshall Curry

If A Night at the Garden doesn't give you chills, I don't know what will.  Actual footage from 1939 in New York when Madison Square Garden held an enormous, sold out, one night only Nazi rally proclaiming the desire to establish a Gentile government, to expel Jews from the evil media, and to align the United States of America with the ideals of Nazi German.  This happening right when Hitler was completing work on his 6th concentration camp.  If you are in the camp of people who grow frenzied in the shouts of "USA, USA," or engage in debates about where there is enough iconography on your stages, or laugh and cheer when a protestor is punched in the face by people attending a rally, this film is meant explicitly for you.   Marshall Curry, the filmmaker, says explicitly that these images are so haunting for what is happening today among certain people in politics in America.  It is particularly haunting to think that people don't know that Nazism  was indeed embraced in America, despite what you may think.  It is not a history lesson.  It is a lesson for today.  

Documentary Short - Rayka Zehtabchi and Melissa Berton

"A period should be the end of a sentence.  Not the end of a girl's education."  This is the motto of an incredible group of teenagers from Oakwood School in Los Angeles who discovered that in India (and probably other areas of the world), menstruation is such a source of shame that most people won't talk about it, or possibly don't know about it.  They discovered that many girls were dropping out of school when they started having their periods merely because they couldn't or wouldn't manage their periods while at school.  So came The Pad Project.  What's more, these girls and their families raised money and worked with an inventor who found a way to create high quality, low cost pads (the kind women use when they have their periods), provided the machinery, and helped create small businesses in smaller Indian towns where the women produce and sell these pads.  Girls stay in school, women in business financially lift their households, and shame about menstruation (something every woman goes through) is diminished.  Sounds like a winner to me.