One of the most pleasant ways to learn about a country is to go to a movie made in or about somewhere you don't live. When Oscar nominations for short and feature films are announced, it's time to start looking for theatres that show them, because many of these potential Academy Award winners have an international connection.
This year, in the animated shorts category, South Africa presents Revolting Rhymes based on Ronald Dahl's dark spin on fairy tales. One French short, Negative Space, shows a sad relationship between father and son can exist in any culture, and, in another French short, two amphibians explore a deserted mansion. These shorts are shown together with two U.S. films: the Pixar short, Lou, that ran before Cars and Kobe Bryant's retirement letter, Dear Basketball.
Since the live action shorts nominated for Oscars often portray news events, they can be a pleasant way to see both uplifting and unpleasant aspects of a country. Watu Wote (All of Us) shows how Muslims risked their lives to protect the Christians riding on a bus with them, when Islamic terrorists attacked in Kenya. The British short, The Silent Child, introduces the social worker who taught a deaf 4-year-old girl the sign language that enabled her to come out of the shadows and be included in family conversations. Two U.S. entries cover a school shooting in Atlanta titled DeKalb Elementary and My Nephew Emmett based on the 1955 racist murder of Emmett Till. Australian humor is on display in The Eleven O'Clock, a short about an appointment between a psychiatrist and patient that try to treat each other.
Families already may have seen the animated feature, Coco, which has a Mexican theme depicting how a death in the family shouldn't end memories of a relative. Loving Vincent probably won't have wide distribution, but if young people have a chance to see this Polish-British feature, it might be their only time to see a movie where each frame about Vincent Van Gogh is made by an oil painting. Since Angelina Jolie produced The Breadwinner, this animated feature likely has wider distribution. It shows how an 11-year-old girl disguised herself as a boy to grow up with more opportunities under the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Although too advanced to be appropriate or understood by young people, the live action foreign language films nominated for Academy Awards provide adults with points of view from Chile (A Fantastic Woman), Lebanon (The Insult), Russia (Loveless), Hungary (On Body and Soul), and Sweden (The Square).
Oscar winners will be announced on Sunday, March 4, 2018.
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