Documentarians who make feature-length films have become
incredibly savvy when it comes to what makes documentaries sell. Many of them
nowadays weave a narrative from the material they gather. What was once a
rather dry art form used strictly for information dissemination has now become
full-fledged entertainment in many of the same ways fictional films are. They
have characters and there’s a plot and story arc. The short-form documentary
doesn’t really have the time to do all that so we’re left with a purer form of
art, used by filmmakers to call attention to a problem, a hero, an artist, or
another work of art that maybe we don’t think about often enough. With the
program of Oscar-nominated documentary shorts, you get five films that are
straight-forward and to the point of their subject matter.
First up is Body
Team 12, the shortest of the lot at only twelve minutes. It has little time
to do much other than spend a few minutes in the horrors of the job of a team
from the Liberian Red Cross whose duties involved collecting the bodies of
Ebola victims during the deadly outbreak last year. They gear up with full body
coverings, multiple pairs of gloves, and goggles. They go in, take blood
samples, and then remove the corpse to a crematorium. One team member follows
with an anti-bacterial spray to douse the site where the body was and to rinse
his team members’ protective gear as they remove it. The risk of infection is
terrifying enough and it’s hard not to conjure memories of the 1995 film Outbreak in which a small breach in the
armor led to death. But sometimes the most dangerous part of the job is trying
to convince family members to take away their loved ones’ bodies without a
burial and gravesite. One group of angry men threaten to burn their car with
them inside it. David Darg’s film is a harrowing look at grief that accompanies
tragedy and at the unsung heroes who helped avert further spread of the disease
as much personal risk to themselves.
A Girl in the
River: The Price of Forgiveness is by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. She won this
Oscar four years ago for a film about female victims of acid attacks in
Pakistan. This film tackles a similar and in many ways more horrific problem of
the barbarous patriarchal society: the honor killing. Her subject is Saba, a
woman of nineteen who married a man against her family’s wishes. Her father and
uncle drove her to a remote location, shot her in the face, put her in a bag,
and dumped her in a river. She survived and made her way to safety,
reconstructive surgery, and the relative comfort and safety of her husband and
his family – neighbors of Saba’s own. When Saba’s mother and sister are
interviewed, they are unsympathetic, believing she got what she deserved. Her
father, interviewed from behind bars, believes he did the right thing to bring
respect back to himself and his household. Saba’s pro-bono lawyer, a fighter
for social justice, illuminates the fact that perpetrators of honor killings
can be acquitted if the victim’s family members forgive him. This means that
murder is not a crime against the state, but against an individual and their
family. Imagine the power of coercion the male members of a family can exert
over the females to get their official court-recorded forgiveness statement so
they can get away with murder. In Saba’s case, she is not dead, and insists she
can never forgive her family as long as she lives. Unfortunately, she lives in
a society that favors the wishes of village elders (all male) who prize honor
and respect above rational justice. So Saba and her new family are left in the
precarious position of doing something they know in their hearts to be wrong,
but which will keep the peace. I think it’s important, by way of not thinking
of Pakistan as being overrun with this kind of barbarism, to keep in mind that
these attitudes and actions are a minority. But that the law allows people to
get away with it has led to an increase in these crimes. Three years ago I
found Saving Face to be more
emotionally moving, but Obaid-Chinoy has given us a pair of films that are
essential to bringing awareness to a country in need of humanitarian reform.
The most artistically impressive of the five is Last Day of Freedom. It is an account by
one man, Bill Babbitt, of his younger brother Manny’s troubled life that
started with difficulties in school, brought him two tours in Vietnam leading
to severe PTSD, homelessness, murder, and the death penalty. This is the type
of doc that takes on a cause – in this case capital punishment and mental
illness. Babbitt states openly at the start that he was at one time fully in
favor of the death penalty until it came to visit his family. Co-directors Dee
Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman animated the whole film which affords them the
freedom to present images described by Babbitt that we otherwise wouldn’t see.
Those images exist only as memories and so they are presented as crude
sketches. They are like Babbitt’s half-remembered dreams, images such as Manny
at age four or five digging in the clam flats of Cape Cod or of his adult
brother playing under some bed sheets made into a fort with his nephews on his
last day of freedom before Bill turned him in to the police for the murder of a
neighborhood woman. Babbitt’s recounting of his decision to turn Manny in
provides a heartbreaking tale, not only because Bill sees his little brother as
a broken man, a man helpless without his family, a man whose illness was not
yet understood by psychiatrists or society, but because in the name of justice
and what’s right, he sent his brother to death row. This is the most powerful,
most interesting, and most tightly crafted of the bunch, but it won’t win the
Oscar.
Courtney Marsh’s Chau,
beyond the lines is about a teenager in Vietnam who dreams of become an
artist and clothing designer. What makes his story more than ordinary is his
physical affliction, allegedly the result of the use of Agent Orange defoliant
during the Vietnam War. The effects of the chemical carry over into genetic
birth defects in the children of those exposed. Chau has grown up in a special
home for disabled children, many of them Agent Orange victims. Chau likes to
draw and every year enters a contest that he never wins. He has taught himself
to sketch pretty well considering the very limited use he has of his hands and
arms. He is not capable of coloring, so he has another child in his home help
him. Marsh filmed over the course of about eight years, catching up with Chau
again when he was seventeen and decided to leave the home to return to his
parents in the countryside. Unable to achieve much there, he goes to the city
and tries to make it as an artist, eventually teaching himself to paint by
holding the brush in his mouth. As a profile of a remarkable individual of
valiant and undeterred spirit, Marsh’s film is noble. For me, it’s the
peripheries in Chau’s life that most intrigue me. What about the effects of
Agent Orange on the country as a whole? What about the nurses and caretakers in
the group home who seem to have little affection for the children and squash Chau’s
dreams at every turn? What about the parents who stole his state-awarded money
for victims of Agent Orange? Those details fill out the fabric of Chau’s life
and help make a fuller film.
Finally comes Adam Benzine’s Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, about Lanzmann’s process of
directing and editing Shoah, his nine
hour documentary on the Holocaust. For as much as can be achieved in under
forty minutes, Benzine’s film is reasonably impressive. But how much can we
really learn about such a daunting process in so little time. This film is the
only one that really feels like it needs to be longer. There isn’t enough
focused exploration of one particular aspect of the filmmaking, but a somewhat
scattershot task that tries to encompass several disparate incidents and ideas,
including Lanzmann’s hidden camera exploits to get former Nazi guards to talk
(one of which got him hospitalized for a month). If nothing else, Benzine’s
film would make a welcome addition to the Criterion Collection’s issue of Shoah.
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