On Tuesday night, I headed over for a pseudo-date to the Kendall Square theatre, the local artsy theatre in town, which every year offers the awesome deal to watch all 5 Oscar-nominated short films as a package for the price of a single movie. This is done both for live-action and for animated.
I went to check out the live-action set, finally making it after 4 years of hearing about this but never actually making it out. The 5 films were:
1) A funky french/russian (?) fantasy film in which a man, to repay some sort of debt to save his own life (we walked in a couple minutes late), must use a magical camera to capture photos of the silhouettes of 10,000 individuals at the moment they die. These shadow images are then displayed on canvases lining the walls of a mysterious mansion. At the end, he could resurrect his own life in the real world.
2) An old french man gradually becomes conscious of the loss of his own memory, and has to come to terms with it in the context of a world growing increasingly confusing.
3) While attempting to commit suicide in his bathtub, a young man in NYC is called by his troubled sister to watch her young but fearless daughter for an evening. Her pugnacity incites intrigue in him, leading to a confession to his sister of how important she is to him despite their troubled past.
4) A young blacksmith boy and his adventurous beggar friend in Kabul, Afghanistan, venture out through an old palace and to a Buzkashi match (men on horses trying playing capture the flag with a goat), exploring the internal competition between pursuing dreams and maintaining loyalty to father and tradition.
5) A young, intelligent, and courageous boy in a coastal village in Somalia encounters greedy soldiers from Mogadishu, whose attack on the local wise fisherman send the boy out on his first solo fishing adventure, which leads him hilariously to a small yacht and the "white lion-fish" (a dog) that he brings home as his sea bounty.
I love shorts. So much fun and imagination in such a short period of time. My vote goes (barely) to the first film, with #5 a close 2nd and #3 an even closer 3rd.
I went to check out the live-action set, finally making it after 4 years of hearing about this but never actually making it out. The 5 films were:
1) A funky french/russian (?) fantasy film in which a man, to repay some sort of debt to save his own life (we walked in a couple minutes late), must use a magical camera to capture photos of the silhouettes of 10,000 individuals at the moment they die. These shadow images are then displayed on canvases lining the walls of a mysterious mansion. At the end, he could resurrect his own life in the real world.
2) An old french man gradually becomes conscious of the loss of his own memory, and has to come to terms with it in the context of a world growing increasingly confusing.
3) While attempting to commit suicide in his bathtub, a young man in NYC is called by his troubled sister to watch her young but fearless daughter for an evening. Her pugnacity incites intrigue in him, leading to a confession to his sister of how important she is to him despite their troubled past.
4) A young blacksmith boy and his adventurous beggar friend in Kabul, Afghanistan, venture out through an old palace and to a Buzkashi match (men on horses trying playing capture the flag with a goat), exploring the internal competition between pursuing dreams and maintaining loyalty to father and tradition.
5) A young, intelligent, and courageous boy in a coastal village in Somalia encounters greedy soldiers from Mogadishu, whose attack on the local wise fisherman send the boy out on his first solo fishing adventure, which leads him hilariously to a small yacht and the "white lion-fish" (a dog) that he brings home as his sea bounty.
I love shorts. So much fun and imagination in such a short period of time. My vote goes (barely) to the first film, with #5 a close 2nd and #3 an even closer 3rd.
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