Everything that’s up for an award this year is good to at least some degree, and there’s a huge variety in style and tone, other than maybe in the documentary category, which is quite heavy aside from one notable entry.
There are two films that stand above all the others, though. One is that short from the documentary category and it’s called Perfectly a Strangeness. This probably isn’t going to resonate with you when I tell you this, but just trust me—it essentially follows three donkeys wandering around in a desert as they come across a huge astronomical observatory. But in just 15 minutes it unfolds into something glorious, a set of absurdly gorgeous images that cause us to contemplate the immense majesty of the heavens and the immediate roughness of a donkey’s beard, turning us inward and outward just with the magic of pictures and sounds. It’s kind of a small miracle, and completely unexpected.
The other film is called Butterfly, and it’s from the animated shorts. It tells the story of a Jewish North African swimmer who competed for France in the Olympics in the years bookending World War II and his torment at the hands of the Nazis. An interesting enough story, but the film was made by painstakingly hand-painting each frame onto glass sheets, and the result is astonishing, as each image melts into the next, evoking the water through which the man swims and the malleability of memory. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.
The Wichita Public Library will be screening the entire slate of Oscar nominated short films for the 40th year this Saturday at the Boulevard Theatre in Old Town, and they’ll show portions of the program at various library branches between March 8th and the 15th. Their full schedule of screenings is at wichitalibrary.org.
