If there were an award for grimmest category, Best Live Action Short might be the undisputed champion: Year after year, voters fill this category with dark films, including a disturbingly large number whose central feature is children in peril. Kids don’t feature in this year’s category—but when the most uplifting entries deal with mass incarceration and saying goodbye to a dying partner, you know you’re in serious territory.
Ala Kachuu—Take and Run
Set in modern day Kyrgyzstan, Maria Brendle’s 38-minute short portrays a young woman (played in a debut performance by Alina Turdumamatova) who is apprehended off the street, held captive and forced into a marriage. “When I first heard about bride kidnapping and learned how often this happens, I felt I had to do something,” said Brendle, who dedicated her movie to the thousands of real-life women who have fallen victim to the practice. “I wanted to give these women a voice with this film.”
The Dress
Tadeusz Łysiak’s Polish film is a true heartbreaker, the story of a woman of short stature who works in a truck-stop motel and longs for the physical intimacy she’d never experienced. “I wanted to make a movie about loneliness and rejection, and how people tend to reject others based just on physical appearance,” said Łysiak, who made the film as his second-year project at the Warsaw Film School and insisted on giving it a tough, emotionally brutal ending. “For the most part, the movie is a fairy tale,” he said. “But we decided that the issue is too important to give comfort at the end, that we needed to show that life is not a fairy tale, it’s very cruel.”
The Long Goodbye
The shortest of the nominees at 12 minutes, The Long Goodbye is also the most chaotic and the angriest, with Oscar-nominated actor Riz Ahmed in a searing performance as a man whose family gathering is interrupted by a violent anti-immigrant attack. “I was thinking a lot about themes of belonging and identity and nationalism and rising intolerance,” said Ahmed, who co-created and co-wrote the film with director Aneil Karia. “It came from a very instinctive place,” Ahmed added of his blistering final monologue. “That sequence carried the moments of playing around with the family, the horror and kinetic energy of what happened in the streets—and suddenly, it was a moment to exhale and just scream.”
On My Mind
Danish director Martin Strange-Hansen won in this category for 2002’s This Charming Man, and producer Kim Magnusson has seven nominations and two previous wins. Their collaboration finds a man going into a bar to record a karaoke performance of “Always on My Mind,” finding grace in the face of tragedy that sets it apart in the category. The film was inspired by Strange-Hansen’s own experience of losing his daughter. “When we had to say goodbye to her, I remember that feeling of not having regret,” he said. “There was some kind of magic in the way she had been there and had taught me about being a human being—and when you’re in those decisive moments in life, you realize how important rituals become.”
Please Hold
Simultaneously the funniest and the most infuriating of the nominees, Please Hold is set in a future Los Angeles where policing and incarceration is handled by drones and you can spend years in jail without ever seeing or speaking to a person. Director K.D. Dávila has a lot to say about for-profit prisons, but her film is also designed to strike a chord with anybody who’s been stuck in endless automated voice-prompt systems—which is to say, everybody.
Steve’s Perspective
It can be almost impossible to figure out what will appeal to voters in this category. On My Mind is the most healing entry, which at one point would have made it the favorite; The Long Goodbye is the most incendiary, which could help in the current climate; and Please Hold is the only American nominee, with a setup designed to draw nods of recognition. And the other two are the longest and saddest. The race feels as if it might come down to Please Hold (the most accessible) and The Long Goodbye (the one with a movie star, Riz Ahmed).
