Films that cross border into politics
Award-nominated shorts enter waters that bigger-name features won’t dare.
When the year’s best films are name-checked at the Oscars on Sunday night, the list will cover a broad range of topics, including family (“Manchester by the Sea”), communication (“Arrival”), ambition (“La La Land”) and race and sexuality (“Moonlight”).
The most potent global issue of recent years — the Middle East/North African refugee crisis and its questions of national security, immigration and religious tolerance — will be nowhere in sight.
But the Oscars have a trick up their sleeve. Fully half of the 10 movies nominated for the non-animated shorts prizes this year are migration-themed — everything from Greece coast guard officers rescuing refugees on rickety boats (the documentary short “4.1 Miles,” one of three in that category) to fraught encounters between Western governments and Muslim immigrants (the French piece “Enemies Within,” one of two in the scripted category).
These movies have the power to turn the Oscars into a political powder keg. With President Trump’s executive order banning many travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries, the shorts inject themselves right into the last month’s headlines.
“The fact that the academy is honoring these films about refugees is telling,” said Daphne Matziaraki, the Greek American filmmaker who directed “4.1 Miles.” “Nominating these movies is in a way a form of protest for what’s happening in this country.”
Winners in one or both categories could well comment on the ban in their acceptance speeches, while the president, who in the past has live-Tweeted the Oscars, will almost certainly be paying attention.
Shorts have long been an also-ran set of categories, but a number of factors this year are converging to change that.
Shorts can be made faster than features, making them more responsive to current events. And shorts filmmakers tend to require less money in general, allowing them to gamble on commercially riskier subjects like refugees.
“This is a blinding flash of the obvious, but the shorts are very international, which makes them very diverse,” said Bob Rogers, a two-time Oscar shorts nominee who serves on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science’s Board of Governors for the shorts categories. “And if you’re paying for it all yourself, which you can’t do with Hollywood movies, you get to have much more to say and a lot fewer people to answer to.”
Subjects of several nominated shorts had to sweat out the battle between the White House and the courts before being allowed to come to the Oscars. The central character in the documentary short “Watani: My Homeland” — a Syrian refugee named Hala Kamil whose Free Syrian Army fighter husband was kidnapped by ISIS and is presumed dead — will come to the Oscars after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court Court of Appeal’s decision to uphold a stay of Trump’s order enabled an eleventhhour visa.
“Somebody Tweeted the other day that if Hillary was president we’d all just be talking about movies and TV shows now,” said Bryn Mooser, the head of the L.A.based Ryot Studio, the company behind “Watani.” “This country is awake in many places it hasn’t been before, and the Oscars reflect that.”
A scripted short that lands with such weight is “Enemies Within.” Selim Azzazi, the France-based son of Algerian immigrants, made the movie to tell of his late father, who grew up in the African country when it was still a French colony.
His film tracks a tense interrogation between an immigrant seeking French citizenship and the suspicious bureaucrat who can grant it — an ethnically tense twohander that drills down to the personal stakes at the heart of the Muslim immigration debate. What starts out as a sundry conversation turns into an unexpected Sophie’s Choice as the immigrant is forced to choose between giving names of his Muslim friends from a prayer group and the country he badly wants (and deserves) to be a part of.
While it’s set in the 1990s, the issues couldn’t be more relevant. Azzazi views the events in the film as a kind of bridge between the House Un-American Activities Committee (he lived briefly in Georgia and counts “The Crucible” as an influence) and the current immigration debate.
“It’s always the same process. There are people who want to be thought as part of the country, and there’s a part of the population that cannot accept that, and it splits the country in half,” he said.
Meanwhile, “Silent Nights,” another scripted shorts nominee, centers on a relationship between a Ghanaian refugee and a local woman he meets at a Denmark absorption center.
“It wasn’t like we sat down and said ‘Let’s make a timely movie,’ ” said Kim Magnusson, the Danish producer of the film, expressing a sentiment shared by many of the shorts filmmakers. “But the more we got into it the more the world began to evolve. And then when Trump came to power it became prescient.”
For “Watani,” which tells of a family that fled Aleppo and is trying to start a new life in a small German town, the issues are equally up-tothe-minute, including outside the film.
Ryot Studio and the filmmakers decided to bring Kamil in on a visa despite the potential for an airport holdup — and despite the decision by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (“The Salesman”) to stay home — because it could sway public opinion about the ban.
“4.1 Miles” director Matziaraki hopes her film has an eye-opening effect in the U.S. and Europe, especially as it is spotlighted at the Oscars.
“When you read the news you may feel empathy but it’s the other side of the world,” she said in an interview. “I wanted to look at these two realities colliding — the comfort-zone reality and this other reality.
“We’re going through historic times,” she added. “We can’t be detached.”
steve.zeitchik@latimes.com