You might not believe it, but the Academy Awards mean a lot. Sure, it’s nice to be nominated, but winning that 8.5-pound golden statue — designed by the great MGM art director Cedric Gibbons and, allegedly, modeled after a nude sketch of the Mexican filmmaker Emilio Fernández — opens a lot of doors. Particularly doors closed to filmmakers who’ve been on the scene but are still gaining recognition and acclaim.
Yes, it’s exciting to see all those big names and follow which top-line movies walk with the hardware, but it’s always the down-ballot categories that catch my eye. And on March 2, I’ll be rooting extra hard for two to win at the 97th Academy Awards: Flow and Incident.
Flow, from filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, is the first Latvian production to receive an Academy Award nomination. And since it’s a twofer, nominated in the Animated Feature Film and International Feature Film categories, Flow has a good shot at winning Latvia’s first Oscar — an honor well deserved for this 85-minute, dialogue-free story of a dark gray cat trying to survive a biblical flood.
Flow provides little context as to when and where we are, but that isn’t the point. No humans appear in the movie — only the left-behind artifacts and structures are evidence of their existence as the waters rise and recede. That just leaves us with a handful of animals to watch as nature navigates Earth’s next step.
Zilbalodis wisely avoids anthropomorphizing the animals. But that doesn’t mean they are free from personality. There’s a bossy stork, a helpful capybara, a narcissistic ringtail lemur and an earnest but troublesome labrador retriever. Fascinatingly, the cat is the only one who resists any kind of simplistic description — fitting for a feline.
Animated with the open-source program Blender, Zilbalodis’ images are simultaneously basic and beautiful. And with no dialogue to get hung up on, your mind is free to wander this world and marvel along with the cat. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a story of community in how the animals band together to stay alive. And how those tentative alliances evaporate once basic instincts take over.
Flow is Zilbalodis’ second feature — his first, Away, is equally outstanding. Pay attention to the end credits to see just how much of a one-man band he is. They’ve already erected a statue of the cat in Latvia’s capital city of Riga. Imagine how happy they’ll be when Zilbalodis brings home a statue or two of his own.
Shots fired
I first saw Bill Morrison’s Incident at the Telluride Film Festival in 2023 and immediately fell under its spell. But where does a 30-minute documentary, composed entirely from preexisting surveillance footage — police body cams, closed circuit cameras and smartphones — live after its festival life? I had no idea then, but I knew it was strong enough that I had to include it on my top 10 of 2023, even if most couldn’t see it.
Now, it’s available to all thanks to The New Yorker’s documentary video series and has received a significant boost in attention thanks to its nomination for Documentary Short Film.
With Incident, Morrison compiles footage from a 2018 Chicago police shooting of a Black man, Harith “Snoop” Augustus, to explore how quickly and harmfully narratives are constructed to explain away a split-second decision that shouldn’t have happened.
After the screening at Telluride, Morrison said he always wanted to tell a Rashômon-like story invoking the 1950 Japanese film where multiple eyewitness accounts don’t corroborate an incident but confound it.
That opportunity presented itself when friend and journalist, Jamie Kalven, reported on the killing of Augustus and gathered hours upon hours of footage from the Chicago Police Department. Using split screens and overlapping panels, Morrison reconstructs the moments leading up to the shooting and deconstructs the post-shooting narrative the police create to justify the killing while the community gathers to play the role of judgmental consciousness.
Incident is Morrison’s first Oscar nomination, a long time coming for an archival documentarian who has been innovating with found footage for more than a quarter-century now. Should he hoist the statue on Sunday, it will be a welcome sight.
ON SCREEN: The 97th Academy Awards are Sunday, March 2, on ABC. Flow is playing in limited release and streaming on Max. Incident is available to watch via The New Yorker.