Oscar Nominations Enlighten the World

This year's Oscar nominations for live action short films provide a view of France, Denmark, Hungary, Spain, and Switzerland that is both particular to those countries and inspiring to countries throughout the world.

In Ennemis Interieurs (Enemies Within) and Silent Nights we see French concern for residents from Algeria who might be terrorists and a man from Ghana who finds in Denmark abuse from local and Arab neighbors rather than the income he expected to send to his family back in Africa. In both cases disillusioned men do things they never intended, and we wonder if their new countries could have acted differently to prevent these outcomes.

Sing from Hungary won the Oscar in this category on February 26, 2017. This film tells the story of a friendly elementary school girl with a heart and a new girl who is told by the chorus director to just mime the words to songs because she doesn't have a good voice. By convincing all the children in the chorus to mime the words to every song at a competition, the two clever girls undermine the director who they consider unfair. Children everywhere in the world could benefit from seeing how to treat new kids in their schools and how they can work together to right an injustice.          

Spain's Timecode gives hope to everyone who has ever had a boring job. After his shift as a security guard who watches the cameras that keep an eye on a garage parking lot, he uses the whole garage as a dance floor to practice his moves. The woman who takes over after him sees his performance and decides to do her own routine for the cameras. After the male security guard sees her dancing, they join up for a duet that the manager sees when he is introducing a new guard to the job. The film ends with the new employee telling the manager, "I don't know how to dance."

A woman's daily gesture of waving a Swiss flag at a passing TGV train before she rides her bicycle to her pastry shop leads to an exchange of messages and gifts of cheese between the woman and the train's engineer in  La Femme et le TGV. You never know where simple gestures might lead. 

See the World in Oscar-Nominated Films

In 2016, Oscars continued to honor a variety of countries at the Academy Awards ceremony on February 28. I'll just name the countries of those I remember who were involved in honored films: Mexico, Chile, Hungary, Israel, Italy, the UK, and Pakistan.

     Before the Academy Awards presentations on February 22, 2015, movie theatres began to show the Live Action and Animated Shorts nominated for Oscars. Last year these shorts gave kids a chance to see life in foreign countries.

     "Butter Lamp" showed the reactions of Tibetan nomads as they had their pictures taken, not by selfies, but by a professional photographer who provided various backdrops showing sites in China.

     "Boogaloo and Graham" captured the reactions of a mother and two boys in Northern Ireland who took care of the chicks their father gave them during the Troubles.

     In "Parvaneh" (a Persian name meaning "Butterfly"), when an Afghan girl seeking asylum in Switzerland enlisted the aid of a local girl, Emely, to help her send money to her family, she encountered lots of red tape and learned girls in different countries with very different lifestyles can be friends.

     A live action short, "My Father's Truck," that didn't quite make the cut to receive an Oscar nomination, showed how family members can live very different lives. When a girl in Vietnam skipped school one day, she found out her life as a school girl was a lot easier than what her father did transporting passengers in his truck. The Chinese father in "Carry On," a film also on a short list of possible Oscar-nominated movies, sacrificed his life to save his family during the Japanese invasion in World War II.

     Some films might show how kids in other countries experience the same things as they do.

     One child's parents can be very different from another child's, as a Norwegian 7-year-old-girl and her sisters learn when they request a bicycle from their hippie parents in "Me and My Moulton," an animated short nominated for an Oscar.

     "Baghdad Messi," a live action short considered for an Oscar, showed how kids in Iraq, even those with only one leg, love soccer as much as kids in other countries.

     "Summer Vacation," an Israeli short considered for an Oscar, may remind kids that every family vacation to a beautiful beach doesn't always go as planned.

     And "Symphony No. 42," an animated short from Hungary that was considered for an Oscar, even notices the similarities between the activities that humans and animals perform. Music in this film includes bird and jungle sounds from Sri Lanka.

     Considering the full-length, Oscar-nominated, foreign language films from Poland (Ida), Russia (Leviathan), Estonia (Tangerines), Mauritania (Timbuktu), and Argentina (Wild Tales), making and viewing movies are popular activities all over the world.



   

A Winter's Tale

Children love stories, and winter provides the perfect time to hear a new one, while cuddled up under a blanket at home or out in a darkened movie theater.

     Kids can follow Agatha, with her cat and bodyguard, as they solve international mysteries in The Curse of the Pharaoh, The Pearl of Bengal, and The King of Scotland's Sword by Steve Stevenson.

    In the prize-winning picture book, Nino Wrestles the World by Yuyi Morales, kids can have fun learning about the colorful luchadores in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries who wear masks to hide their identities when wrestling. Or they can go along with a boy and his duck on a funny Japanese adventure in Dodsworth in Tokyo by Tim Egan.

     Although it's a child-tailored reference book, History Year by Year: The History of the World, from the Stone Age to the Digital Age, kids will like the "Child of the Time" features which describe the lives of children during various historical periods. The descriptions could lead to role playing using the book's quotations from primary and secondary sources or their own imaginations.

     Unlike last year's Oscar-nominated live action shorts (Described in the earlier post, "See the World at the Movies"), this year's fail to give a broad picture of the lives of children in foreign countries."Helium," which won the Oscar, focused on a dying child and "Aquel No Era Yo" (That Wasn't Me) shows the tragic life of an African child soldier. If the Oscar-nominated short animated films are being shown at a local movie theater, however, children (and adults) would enjoy the banter of the ostrich and giraffe "puppets" that introduce them. "Mr. Hublot," which won the Oscar, could inspire a child to draw a series of robots with a mechanical/robotic pet that gets bigger and bigger. Mr. Hublot eventually had to move to a warehouse. In one animated short, "Room on a Broom," which is also a book, a witch, cat, dog, frog, and bird prove no one should be excluded anywhere in the world.

     The credits of all foreign films show how names differ from one country to another. These new names may come in handy when a child is naming his or her doll, plush toy, or action figure. (See the earlier post, "What's in a Name?")

See the World at the Movies

Not every film that provides a glimpse of a foreign country or culture is a child friendly "Sound of Music." But it is worth screening new movies and animated features to find a "Brave" that introduces children to different countries.

     In fact, an amazing number of countries have been featured in Oscar-winning films: "ARGO" (Iran), "The King's Speech" (United Kingdom), "The Hurt Locker" (Iraq), "Slumdog Millionaire" (India), "Braveheart" (Scotland), "Schindler's List" (Poland), "The Last Emperor" (China), "Gandhi" (India).

     The Academy Awards also honor the best foreign language films. The 2011 winner, "A Separation" from Iran, provided positive recognition to a country sanctioned for its nuclear program and scorned in ARGO for holding U.S. citizens hostage. The director of the 2012 best foreign language winner, "Amour," is from Austria.

     Like foreign language films, animated and live action short subjects don't have wide-spread distribution, but, if they are shown locally, they can give youngsters insight into the lives of children in other countries. In "Asad," one of the 2012 live action nominees, we saw Somali children dealing with their dysfunctional world, and in another 2012 nominee, "Buzkashi Boys" opened our eyes to the limited opportunities for young boys in Afghanistan.

     Perhaps the best impact a film can have on a child is the realization that, not only can foreign be fun, but humor also can expose the foolishness of a situation by looking at it differently, the way a live action short about Rwanda's bloody Hutu-Tutsi struggle did a couple of years ago.