Completed Category: Documentary Shorts

Friends, enemies, countrypeople, et. al., it's one of those years where I'm going to insist that you absolutely need to watch the Documentary Shorts. 

Documentary Short Film
Instruments of a Beating Heart
Incident
I Am Ready, Warden
The Only Girl In The Orchestra 
Death By Numbers

This year we have: life, death, death, life, and death.

Issues include: racism, death penalty, killing of civilians by police, school shootings, sexism, grief, the meaning of life, creating art, and overcoming obstacles. 

You can see the Doc Shorts in select theatres this week and honestly, yes, it's worth dropping whatever you have to do or have scheduled the next few days.  Seriously, get a babysitter, take the afternoon off work, skip your church group - or heck, gather up and bring your church group - and hie thee to the cinema. 

Now, this is certainly a viewer-discretion-is-advised situation, but on the other hand, this is documentation of real life, and nobody really exercised discretion to prevent the real-life people from having to witness and/or experience terrible things up to and including being shot and killed. 

For those who cannot get to the cinema, please watch the ones that are available at home via streaming. Here is the link to Incident, which should be required viewing for you, your family, your neighbors, your friends, your enemies, and whoever else you can find strolling blithely around this Earth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW65ChIjur4 

Incident depicts the killing of a Black man by police in Chicago, and the things the officers both instinctively and calculatedly say and do in the minutes following the incident.  I want this one to win. I think it might. I've never seen a Doc Short quite like it, the way it uses and split screens the various body camera and CCTV camera footage. 

I Am Ready, Warden depicts the lead-up to the execution date for a death row inmate, with input from the condemned man, his murder victim's son, his own son, a church lady who has become his adopted godmother, and a Texas government official. I also want this one to win. It could. It crafts this story so, so, so very well. The "cast" of characters really immerse you in the swirling realities of one man's sentence to death. 

Death By Numbers  depicts the written and spoken reflections of Sam Fuentes,  one of the survivors who was injured in the Parkland, Florida school shooting a few years back as she prepares to testify and speaks to the killer at the sentencing and victim impact statement days in court. She's a great writer. I hope she continues to heal and survive, and to gift us with her words.  I mourn the friends and teachers she lost that day as well as everything that has been taken from her and from other dead and living school shooting victims.  

One of the "feel-good" ones of the bunch is The Only Girl In the Orchestra, uplifting despite the gasp-out-loud sexism and affecting consideration of questions of what should we do with our lives? I recommend it for anyone who has: played music, listened to music, lived in New York, lived as an artist, admired a family member, admired a teacher, watched classic Westerns (no, seriously), touched a stringed instrument, moved a piano, or celebrated the gift of being alive.  It's on Netflix. 

The other feel-good one is Instruments of a Beating Heart, despite the occasional kids crying after either not getting a part they auditioned for or making mistakes as they rehearse the parts they did get. This is an adorable slice of life little film about 7-year-olds preparing to perform "Ode to Joy" with tambourines and whatnot for the incoming first graders at their school in Japan. I adore it. I recommend it to anyone who has ever tried to do something, failed, or succeeded.  It's available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRW0auOiqm4 

Order I want them to win:  THIS IS SO HARD
Maybe Incident or I Am Ready, Warden, then Instruments of a Beating Heart, as those three are such interestingly crafted documentary observances, and then the other two which are also A+ content if a bit more traditional let's-follow-this-person storytelling -- Death By Numbers  and The Only Girl In The Orchestra.  I will not be mad when any of these five win, except for the part where the other four have to not win.  

Order I think they will win:  I DON'T KNOW I said this is hard!!!!!! maybe Incident?