Oscar-nominated documentary shorts offer fresh, humanistic perspectives

The enchanting thing about this year’s – as any year’s – nominations for the Academy Award for best documentary short is how intrinsically humanistic they are. For the most part, these are the stories of people who go about their lives as anyone else would, with happiness, fear and determination, but in ways that separate them from the norm. These films are as diverse as the ordinary people they depict, and the careers or struggles they work through that range from lamentable to heartbreaking. The documentary shorts will be released as two programs with one admission at Laemmle’s Music Hall 3 on Friday.

“Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1”
Directed by Ellen Goosenberg Kent and Dana Perry

The facts that “Crisis Hotline” present in its opening moments are astonishing: among them that the Veterans Crisis Line, a suicide prevention service based out of only one office in upstate New York, receives over 22,000 calls each month. It’s no surprise, then, that the office of workers, all trained in mental health and many of whom are veterans themselves, is a hectic, moving and often difficult place to visit.

And yet the office is open around the clock, because its needs are required at the most urgent of times, even, as “Crisis Hotline” shows, on Christmas Eve. Most of the film consists of anonymous calls from veterans or relatives that are in need of immediate help, lending the documentary an active, emotional presence. The voices of the callers themselves are never played, keeping the scenes appropriately gut-wrenching. “Crisis Hotline” doesn’t go very far in the way of style or grand cinema, but it isn’t trying to – it’s looking to give credit to the receptionist heroes whose job, as traumatic as it can be, is an award-worthy service, Oscar or not.

“Joanna”
Directed by Aneta Kopacz

Polish filmmaker Aneta Kopacz has crafted one of the most touching short films of the past year with “Joanna.” The 45-minute documentary follows the titular subject, a wife and mother who popularly illustrates her life via an online blog, during her final few months before dying of cancer in 2012. Kopacz rather masterfully shows snippets of footage of Joanna in the hospital, instead of focusing on the unspoken, yet clearly evident, domestic trauma the disease has created in the household.

Structured as a series of fragments, “Joanna” becomes profound only when the brief conversations and fleeting moments that make up its duration are put in context. Moments of such serene tenderness become almost difficult to digest, yet increasingly beautiful: a mother and her young son playing in a field, a husband running his hands through his wife’s hair and the same son’s face framed in a window-pane as tears stroll down his face. “Joanna” is brilliant storytelling.

“Our Curse”
Directed by Tomasz Śliwiński and Maciej Ślesicki

Another Polish film, “Our Curse,” presents situations similar to “Joanna,” yet goes about it in a completely different way. Whereas “Joanna” has only minimal references to the cancer itself, “Our Curse” – a film about two parents struggling after finding out that their child has an incurable respiratory disorder – focuses almost exclusively on the parents attempting to come to terms with the diagnosis.

Much of the film is just the husband and wife together on a couch, discussing what is happening and what they can do. They question how this could have happened and how they can cope with his illness in the future. Such conversations are almost unbearably heart-wrenching and one feels nearly intrusive, even voyeuristic just watching the two of them discuss it at length with a stationary camera aimed at them. As a work of art, “Our Curse” does not differentiate itself from a handful of other similar movies about people dealing with real-life illnesses and disease – at least to the extent that “Joanna” does – yet it is nonetheless an interesting production.

“The Reaper” (“La Parka”)
Directed by Gabriel Serra Arguello

At this point, practically everyone has seen some form of documentary that takes a peek inside the torture-like conditions of industrial slaughterhouses. “The Reaper” is among the most artistic of the controversial genre, a take on the life of Efrain, a man who has been killing hundreds of cattle nearly every day for the last 25 years. In the Mexican slaughterhouse that he works at, he has been given the nickname the Reaper by his peers, which only serves to make the point of his difficult relationship with death that much more impactful.

By leaving the narration sparse, director Gabriel Serra Arguello makes “The Reaper” a particularly impressionistic work of filmmaking. Each shot, whether graphic or simply tightly spaced, feels like one out of a vérité horror movie. That’s what makes “The Reaper” hard to swallow: It isn’t the deepest or the most profound of the nominees, but it is definitely the most visually impressive. With an effectively monotonous soundtrack and an observational approach that’s nearly philosophical, Arguello makes a run-into-the-ground subject strangely beautiful.

“White Earth”
Directed by J. Christian Jensen

“White Earth” is the most refreshing of this year’s nominees simply in the way it is approached. Telling the story of North Dakota’s recent oil boom, director J. Christian Jensen doesn’t go about the rural state’s many changes in the most effortless manner – almost all of his subjects are kids, many of whom have only recently come to the area on behalf of their parents’ careers. Some of the kids feel displaced, while others can only wonder what the large spouts of fire bursting out of the ground every night are.

The scenic, snowy landscapes of North Dakota make for some unexpectedly gorgeous visuals, carefully layered with scenes of oil drills bouncing up and down. In the gleam of twilight, they look like mechanical soldiers, simulating the birth of industrial revolution on a small, state-wide scale. From the perspective of children, and their nurturing, often immigrant parents, “White Earth” is an innocent, touchingly personal perspective on what a corrupted system might consider “the ordinary.”