This year, short docs up for Oscars form an uplifting slate

This year the “Oscar Nominated Short Films: Documentary” category is replete with joy and wonder and a short film about a marvelous, irrepressible woman named Martha Mitchell, who might have been in large part responsible for the resignation of the “unindicted co-conspirator” President Richard Nixon.

In “The Martha Mitchell Effect,” a film by Anna Alvergue (“Love, Gilda”) and Debra McClutchy (“The Booksellers”), we are reminded of the power of a single woman who refused to be silenced by the “great men” around her. The film, a brilliant assemblage of existing footage from the Watergate era, tells the story in a way that will make viewers fall in love with the Arkansas-born wife of disgraced Attorney General John

Mitchell. “Martha the Mouth,” as she was nicknamed, formed a bond with redoubtable White House press corps. reporter Helen Thomas and was, according to Nixon himself in an interview with David Frost, the cause of his downfall.

In “Haulout,” a film by the brother-sister team Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, Russian marine biologist Maxim Chakilev lives in a smoky hut by the Chuckti Sea in the Siberian Arctic. One day, he wakes up to find the shaking hut surrounded by a massive crowd of walruses, 95,000 by his estimation. The walruses panic and stampede. Many are killed. The walruses used to gather on the ice. But global warming has forced them onto the beach instead. Eventually, they return to the sea, leaving behind hundreds of carcasses, a dire omen of nature in distress.

In the delightful and heartwarming “The Elephant Whisperers,” Bomman and Bellie, an older couple from South India, care for an orphaned baby elephant named Raghu, who becomes their surrogate child. On a Tiger Reserve in India, Bomman greets Raghu in the morning with the words, “My child.” The calf had its tail bitten off and wounds infested with maggots when it arrived at the reserve. But it thrives after 3 years under Bomman and Bellie’s loving care, eating such delicacies are tree bark and coconut and bathing in a pond. An older elephant named Krishna shows Raghu how to harvest grass. When the authorities take Raghu away from the couple, Bomman and Bellie are thoroughly bereft.

In “Stranger at the Gate,” a Marine Corps. war veteran with PTSD named Kent Kurtz struggles with the seemingly irresistible urge to hurt and even kill the Muslims who have founded a mosque in his neighborhood. The film is in fact the story of how Kurtz experienced a Saul-like change of heart after going to the mosque with the intention of causing trouble. Instead, he was greeted like a family member, a life-changing experience for the troubled Kurtz. The film, directed by the award-winning Joshua Seftel (“The Secret Life of Muslims”), suggests that Kurtz has been able to quell the demons inside him.

“How Do You Measure a Year” tells the arguably sentimental tale of a father who films his daughter once a year on her birthday, asking her similar questions each year. The film directed by Jay Rosenblatt of the 2021 effort “When We Were Bullies,” features Rosenblatt’s daughter Ella, who dreams of putting on make-up as a precocious 3-year-old. At 7, she is a fan of “Hannah Montana.” Ella, who becomes more circumspect and glum as she gets older, is certainly a lovely child and adolescent. But I’m not sure if she and her answers to her father’s banal questions deserve an Oscar nomination.

(“Oscar-Nominated Shorts: Documentary” contains adult themes)