Capital Projections: Short subject edition
This week’s openings include three programs of Oscar-nominated short films, while repertory offerings include recent features from Iran and Turkey as well as a classic Japanese ghost story.
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to notable movie screenings in the coming week.
OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2020: ANIMATION
Oscar completists hoping to watch every nominated film before the Feb. 9 ceremony can check off a generous portion of their watchlist this weekend with programs at Landmark Cinemas. The most crowd-friendly of these programs is the selection of nominees for Best Short Film (Animated).
Pixar — whose blockbuster features such as the Toy Story franchise typically make a killing at the annual awards — turns in the endearing “Kitbull,” which packs a lot of emotion into nine minutes. Directed by Rosana Sullivan, it tells the story of an alley cat and a stray dog that become unlikely friends. Even though the lives of pets would seem to provide merely an exercise in cuteness, this mini-drama chronicles the animals’ struggles in a hard world, and sends a good message to kids, too: that we should put aside our differences and love each other.
While this category typically features some mainstream big-studio output, it’s also a showcase for more inventive animation, like the highly textured stop-motion puppet work in “Daughter,” from Czech director Daria Kashcheeva. If the fluffy creatures in Siqi Song’s “Sister” seem unfinished, the aesthetic demonstrates a point. The film, which appears at first to depict the director’s memories of an annoying little sister, turns out to be a lament for the sister he never had, his mother having been forced to have an abortion due to China’s notorious one-child-per-family policy in the 1980s. These Oscar-nominated short films aren’t just escapist cartoons; they impart valuable and sometimes harsh lessons to viewers of all ages.
Watch the trailer for this year’s Oscar-nominated short films.
Now playing at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row. $12.50.
OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2020: LIVE ACTION
This year’s nominees in the Best Short Film (Live Action) category begin with a pair of highly effective miniature dramas.
The 16-minute film ”A Sister,” from Belgian director Delphine Girald, opens with a close-up shot in a speeding car as Alie (Selma Alaoui) is on the phone with her sister. Or so we think — the film shifts from the point of view inside the car to an emergency call center, where we learn that Alie is in danger and has pretended to call her sister in order to send for help.
The 25-minute film “Brotherhood,” a Tunisian-Canadian production directed by Meryam Joobeur, is even more powerful. The director immerses us in a rural area of Tunisia, where Mohamed (Mohamed Grayaâ), a sheep farmer, is unsettled that his eldest son Chaker (Chaker Mechergui) has returned home after running off to join the Islamic State group in Syria. Chaker has returned with a mysterious and pregnant young wife who keeps her face covered, which seems to prove to Mohamed that his son is a hardened extremist, but the truth is more complicated. Grayaâ is mesmerizing as the conflicted father, and the film is so strong that it could easily have sustained its narrative tension over the course of a longer film. Joobeur has not yet directed a feature, and one hopes that this showcase will open doors for her to take on a full-length drama.
The remaining live action shorts are less successful. Yves Piat’s “Nefta Football Club” tells the story of two boys who live in a Tunisian village near the Algerian border. When the boys discover an unattended donkey carrying a huge drug haul, a bleak comedy ensues, but 17 minutes isn’t long enough to give the story much weight. “Saria,” by American director Bryan Buckley, is based on a tragic 2017 fire that killed 41 girls in a Guatemalan orphanage. It’s clearly a story that should be told, but this abbreviated fictionalization may not be the way to tell it. In Marshall Curry’s “The Neighbor’s Window,” a 30-something Brooklyn couple is mesmerized by a young and exhibitionistic couple who has moved in across the way; it’s mildly diverting, but hardly award-worthy. The inclusion of “Brotherhood,” one of the strongest titles among all three programs, should make this a must-see showcase, but unfortunately, it’s an inconsistent field.
Watch the trailer for “Brotherhood.”
Now playing at Landmark E Street Cinema and Landmark Bethesda Row. $12.50.
OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORT FILMS 2020: DOCUMENTARY
The most substantial and, perhaps not coincidentally, most consistent of the shorts programs is that for Best Documentary (Short Subject), with five titles running a total of 160 minutes.
“In the Absence,” from director Yi Seung-jun, documents a 2014 ferry sinking in South Korea that killed nearly 300 people, many of them students on a class trip. To chronicle the disaster’s infuriating timeline, the director syncs footage of the capsized vessel with audio from officials who bungled the rescue. For instance, in conversations between the coast guard and a presidential representative, South Korea’s government seemed more concerned with video coverage of the scene than with rescuing the hundreds of schoolchildren on board, many of whom were instructed by teachers to stay put as the ship tipped over. In one particularly damning juxtaposition, footage from the second day of the disaster, when the ship’s bow was all that was left above water, is accompanied by the clueless president’s order to instruct survivors to find an air pocket in the ship. It was far too little, too late.
Despite its setting of war-torn Afghanistan, “Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone” is one of the more inspiring films on the program. Director Carol Dysinger documents the remarkable Skateistan program, which takes in children from impoverished areas of Kabul where girls are often not allowed to leave the house. The film follows the progress of a group of girls in the classroom and the skatepark, where learning to tackle a skate ramp gives them the confidence to survive in a region where bombings are a regular occurence.
The most affecting short in this year’s lineup looks at a subject that could not seem more benign: ballroom dancing. Yet Laura Nix’s “Walk Walk Run Cha-Cha” is about much more than a cute couple. Nix tells the story of Paul and Millie Cao, who fell in love as teenagers in war-torn Vietnam but had their shared affection for the cha-cha stymied by communist forces that forbade dancing. The pair were separated, then reunited six years later in California. Now, many years later, the middle-aged couple have enrolled in classes that enable them to rekindle their dance-floor fervor. This is the most cinematic of the documentary shorts; Nix frequently shoots her subjects in slow motion, allowing the Caos’ aging bodies to demonstrate what one ballroom dance teacher explains: “Through motion, you express emotion.” While the subject may seem trivial in a troubled world, the Caos’ elegant dance routines embody a joyful resilience.
Watch the trailer for “Walk Run Cha-Cha.”
Opens Friday, Jan. 31, at Landmark West End Cinema. $12.50.
JUST 6.5
The Iranian films distributed in American art houses are typically subtle dramas from Abbas Kiarostami or Asghar Farhadi. Yet this Tehran blockbuster provides a far different look at the Middle East nation’s cinema. Director Saeed Roustayi opens his crime drama with a scene as breathtaking as anything at your neighborhood multiplex. We meet police detective Samad (Payman Maddi, who was outstanding in Farhadi’s A Separation) trying to chase down a suspect in a drug raid on foot. The young perp is too fast for the graying officer, but that doesn’t mean he gets away; the elusive criminal climbs a fence only to fall into a construction pit, just as a bulldozer drops in a load of dirt to bury him alive.
That black humor sets the tone for a fast-paced thriller that features all the grit and energy of a classic 1970s action movie. The film’s first half charts Samad’s attempts to track down the drug kingpin Naser (Navid Mohammadzadeh), who’s responsible for the growing crack epidemic that has overwhelmed the capital city. With rapid-fire dialogue and hand-held camera footage, Roustayi generates a furious nail-biter that finally takes a breath when Naser is captured midway through the film. But as the film shifts focus to Naser, who’s more conflicted about his nefarious trade than are most movie kingpins, the drama plays out amid the desperate dealings in a corrupt judicial system. Just 6.5 takes its title from the number of addicts estimated in Tehran at the film’s end. Samad’s corrupt partner explains that they should be happy there are just 6.5 million — it could be 20 million. Volcanic performances from Maadi and Mohammadzadeh lend a seething emotion you’d never see in a dry American procedural, and send out the 24th Iranian Film Festival with a bang.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, Feb. 2, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
Thursday, Feb. 6, at 7 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
KURONEKO
1968 was a volatile year around the world; in Japan, student protests erupted, inspiring the Provoke school of photography that railed against corporate malfeasance and conventional aesthetics. Director Kaneto Shindo wasn’t directly tied to such political and aesthetic uprisings, but his provocative ghost story Kuroneko (Black Cat), released in 1968, seems like another curious symptom of a nation in crisis.
Inspired by Japanese folk tales of felines and vengeful, shape-shifting spirits, the plot unfolds when a group of samurai set upon Yone (Nobuko Otowa) and her daughter-in-law Shige (Kiwako Taichi). The men rape and kill the women and burn their house down. In the ashes, a black cat comes to lick the bodies. The samurai class soon comes to power in the land, and warriors become used to getting anything they want. Yet whenever one of their kind passes through the area, they meet a mysterious pair of women who turn into cat-like monsters and drink samurai blood.
The black-and-white cinematography by Kiyomi Kuroda illuminates and isolates bright objects in the midst of darkness, sustaining a perfectly eerie mood for the horror and bloodshed. And when Yone’s son Hachi (Kichiemon Nakamura) returns from war to find his mother and wife gone, the tragedy takes on a heartbreaking element. Kuroneko is set sometime in the Sengoku period from the 15th through 17th centuries, but its age-old tale of violence and corruption resonated during a tumultuous modern era. The Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery will be screening a 35-mm print as part of its Monthly Matinees series of Japanese classics.
Watch the trailer.
Wednesday, Feb. 5, at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
RENZO PIANO — THE ARCHITECT OF LIGHT
Somebody — it might have been comedian Martin Mull or musician Frank Zappa — said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. Yet what is dance but the body in motion around architecture? So Spanish director Carlos Saura, best known for such terpsichorean films as Blood Wedding and Carmen, seems like a good choice to undertake a profile of Italian architect Renzo Piano, designer of The New York Times’ headquarters and Paris’ Pompidou Center. This 2018 film documents the construction of Centro Botin, a distinctive cultural center he designed in Santander on the northern coast of Spain. In its program notes, the National Gallery of Art writes: “The story becomes a reflection on Piano’s creative process and on the synergetic relationship between architecture and cinema.”
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Feb. 1, at noon at the National Gallery of Art in the West Building Lecture Hall. Free.
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