2011 Oscar Nominated Documentaries (Short Subject)

As James Franco and Anne Hathaway prepare for their big night on Sunday, it’s worth noting that the Oscars are not only about fashion statements and forgettable skits, but that there are also films and filmmakers in the mix. For some of these, the night — or even the run-up to the night — can be transformative.

Case in point: the Oscar-Nominated Shorts, typically grouped together as such. In decades past, these awards were by definition off-radar for viewers of the Oscars telecast, as the films remained unseen and the makers mostly unknown. Now, with the help of Shorts International, Magnolia Pictures, the animated and live-action shorts, which went to select theaters in mid February, are now available on iTunes and VOD.

As in previous years, 2011’s nominees for Best Documentary (Short Subject) are harder to see (all trailers are available on YouTube). And as always, they are plainly and movingly labors of love. Consider The Warriors of Qiugang, filmed over three years by Ruby Young and Thomas Lennon. Following the efforts of a small group of Chinese villagers to fight back against the Jiucalio Company, since 2004 producing pesticides and dyes while also polluting the local environment pretty much indiscriminately. As the farmer Zhang Gongli points toward the grim results — land devastated and grey, stagnant pools of wastewater — he explains, “In our village, many are saddened, we are sorry to be born in this place. But we had no choice.” The danger they face, he goes on, “comes from the businessmen who have money and the government who has power. Either side can have us killed.”

Zhang and 1801 out of the 1870 neighbors, helped by environmental group Green Anhui, sign petitions, file lawsuits, and wage protests, as they also tell a too familiar story. They know they have a high rate of cancers and other illnesses in the village, but cannot afford to move. Moreover, like other poor communities, they have long felt helpless in the face of corporate and government decisions: “Everyone wants a better environment,” observes one gonnabe activist, “but no one wants to act.”

But as their efforts become a chronology, the film is most compelling in its focus on individuals, including Zhang and Wang Yongcui, who early on whispers, “I shouldn’t say anything, don’t film me,” and then speaks up anyway, using the camera to make her case against a rich family’s collusion with Jiucalio. Zhang too illustrates how cameras shape the movement, as he reveals he’s been cautioned by government and factory officials “not to trust reporters and you people with the camera.” The villagers learn to make use of “the camera,” to uncover corruption and deceit, so The Warriors of Qiugang becomes a mutually beneficial project.

This sort of collaboration is visible as well in other nominated short documentaries. Jed Rothstein’s Killing in the Name is focused on the experiences of Jordanian Ashraf al-Khaled, whose 2005 wedding was targeted by a suicide bomber associated with Al Qaeda in Iraq, leaving 27 people dead, including three of his and his wife’s parents. Years later, Ashraf has become an activist, and the film traces his efforts to speak with young people and self-proclaimed jihadists in order to open a dialogue concerning the killing of Muslims by Muslims.

The film alternates between Ashraf’s work and an interview with Zaid, identified as a recruiter for Al Qaeda in Iraq. Though Zaid refuses to meet with Ashraf himself, the film structures their scenes so they seem in some sort of dialogue — even as their actual non-meeting suggests the gap between communities remains wide. Ashraf meets with one of the 2005 Bali bombers (now remorseful) as well as Mansour Al-Banna, father of another Al Qaeda in Iraq bomber, knowing that the “family is still not believing that he did such an event.” This meeting is difficult, certainly (concluding with Ashraf’s inevitable observation, “If we don’t speak, we won’t reach a solution”), a visit to a classroom full of boys. When Ashraf shows them video of a Bali bombing widow, explaining the effects of the mission on the children, parents, and spouses of victims (“Killing is not problem solving, it only causes miseries for many people”), the students look briefly moved and then depart with smiles on their faces. It’s unclear what has produced this last image, but it doesn’t suggest they’ve absorbed Ashraf’s lesson, even if it has been offered “in their own language.”

The problem of language — as it shapes communication and creates communities — is one subject in Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon’s Strangers No More. Offering a view of Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, the film shows how children from 48 countries come together following tragedies and horrors. It’s not clear how children are selected to attend — some are orphans, others have parents who are refugees — but the school, according to principal Karen Tal, means to “open our arms to every student. Almost every student is running away from something.”

Their relatives have been running too: Johannes’ father, from Sudan, confesses that his son was never able to go to school before; the boy’s new teacher observes, “You see the eyes of the father, you see that he is really tired from running from one place to another.” Bialik-Rogozin provides a haven for families. Here parents find legal help in securing visas or other documents, and students learn history and math and Hebrew, so they might have a shared language and so come to understand one another’s experiences and help one another to build new ones. They tell remarkable stories, as they witnessed parents’ murders (“When she died, I felt a little bit alone, because your mom is like your friend” says Esther, “If you write about it, it does make you feel better”) or endured attacks themselves. Mohammed recalls men invading the family home “with a big knife,” then shooting his grandparents in their heads.” As he’s about to graduate, Mohammed describes his goal, to “make a school in my village.”

Jennifer Redfearn and Tim Metzger’s Sun Come Up follows another effort to conjure miracles. The population of the tiny Carteret Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, faces the loss of their home. The cause is global warming and the effect is the sea’s literal consumption of the land. A host of activists and clan leaders endeavor to find a new place for the Carterets to live on neighboring Bougainville Island.

Several of the Carterets recall their own histories, fishing and swimming as children, helping their parents grow bananas and sugar cane, where the fields are now “desert.” As Carteret representatives visit the Tinputz district, they’re anxious about a number of factors in the relocation process. Not only are inhabitants of Bougainville worried about what they own and whether they might give any of it up, but also the large island has recently been embroiled in a 10-year civil war. Various meetings in the film showcase the interactions among individuals, efforts to describe and appreciate particulars. As Bougainville residents takes up their neighbors’ plight as that of “our brothers,” the government helps as well, sending emergency supplies of rice to the starving Carterets. The film makes clear that even as the move takes place over years, the losses will become more pronounced and irrecoverable. “Most of our culture will have to live inside us,” says community leader Ursula Rakova.

Other sorts of losses are exposed in Sara Nesson’s remarkable Poster Girl. Tracing the experiences of Iraq war veteran Robynn Murray, as she struggles with PTSD and the VA, and finds strength and new forms of self-expression in art. Murray’s voice here is powerful — candid and indignant, generous and deeply intelligent — whether she’s speaking with her mother and her interviewer, or before members of Iraq War Veterans Against the War and her fellow artists at the Combat Paper Project or Warrior Writers. The documentary is at times raw and discomforting, as well as heartening. Murray and Nesson use the camera together, to make clear what’s at stake that in war veterans’ recoveries. As noted in PopMatters‘ review, “Trauma is never quite over, despite the term ‘post.'” And yet, the process of recovery is also relentless.