Short kings

There are no small parts in movies — only those that are long and those that are short.

That was the philosophy British filmmaker Michael Powell ascribed to. It’s one worth keeping in mind anytime you watch a movie, but it’s especially true when you watch this year’s Oscar-nominated short films.

Take Pachyderme — nominated in the Animation category — from French director Stéphanie Clément. It’s a young woman’s recollections of the summer she spent at her grandparents’ house and the grandfather who abused her. The movie runs only 11 minutes, yet there’s nothing small about it. With this much emotion, trauma and realization in such a brief runtime, it’s evident that brevity is what makes Pachyderme’s impression so big.

That’s not always true of all 15 nominated short subjects, which will be playing in three separate programs (Animation, Documentary and Live Action) at CU Boulder’s International Film Series, the Dairy Arts Center and the Sie Film Center this month. But with a slate running the gamut of war, grief, reproductive rights, book banning, economic uplift, clairvoyance and the memoir of a death row inmate, there is more than enough here to illustrate the potency of a truncated running time.

Of the three categories, Live Action (Invincible, Knights of Fortune, Red, White and Blue, The After and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar) stands tallest this year, with offerings from Canada, Denmark, the U.S. and the U.K. You might have already seen Wes Anderson’s Henry Sugar, but this is your chance to see all that formalist control on the big screen.

Henry Sugar is the most well-known of the five nominees, but my money for the Oscar is on Red, White and Blue from director Nazrin Choudhury. Brittany Snow starsas a single mother of two with a positive pregnancy test in her hand. The nearest abortion clinic is a seven-hour drive away, and she lacks the funds to get there. But getting there is imperative, and not for the reason you may suspect. It’s a gut punch of a movie with two scenes that are too on the nose for their own good, but Choudhury plays her audience like a well-tuned piano. 

Over in Documentary (The ABCs of Book Banning, The Barber of Little Rock, Island in Between, The Last Repair Shop and Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó), The Barber of Little Rock from directors John Hoffman and Christine Turner feels like something more than straightforward reportage. 

Hoffman and Turner do an excellent job of laying out the problem at hand — the economic disparity of Black and white residents of Little Rock and how that is easily measured by available banks — and follow the work of community member Arlo Washington for a possible solution. Washington runs a barbershop school. But he isn’t just teaching his students how to cut hair; he’s showing them how to build community and believe in one another. 

Rounding out the nominees is the Animation category, which is, for the record, not family-friendly. This year’s line-up (Letter to a Pig, Ninety-Five Senses, Our Uniform, Pachyderme and War is Over!) presents an interesting array of animation styles, even if they seem to lack a certain aesthetic appeal or clarity. In Letter to a Pig, the intent of the narrative appears to cloud even the drawings themselves.

Of the five, Ninety-Five Senses hits the hardest with a winning combination of emotional heft and levity, one that’s likely to catch you off guard if you don’t know anything going into the program. You might also be surprised that it’s the work of Jared and Jerusha Hess — the married writing-directing team behind Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre and Gentlemen Broncos. In only 13 minutes, the Hesses show their adeptness with tone and technique. It should also get you excited for their upcoming feature-length animation adaptation of Aaron Blabey’s children’s book, Thelma the Unicorn.

The Hesses aren’t the only nominees with features headed for release later this year: Sean Wang, director of Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, just won the Audience Award at Sundance Film Festival for the coming-of-age drama Dìdi (弟弟) and is sure to garner plenty of attention. The future for some of these nominees is already bright. 

ON SCREEN: 2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films — International Film Series, Feb. 16-18 and Feb. 23-25, CU Boulder, Muenzinger Auditorium, 1905 Colorado Ave. | Dairy Arts Center, Feb. 28-March 3, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder. |  Sie FilmCenter, opens Feb. 16, 2510 E. Colfax Ave., Denver.