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.
