Today, I made it through about 6 hours of the Montclair Underdog FIlm Festival, showcasing all of the Academy Award nominated short films for 2010, live action, documentary, and animated.
Left because I have no more tears left to cry for (in the documentary category):
A) Pacific islanders losing their island to the encroaching sea, facing starvation after their small garden plots are ruined by salt water, begging neighboring islanders for a plot of land to call home.
B) Refugee and migrant children from 48 countries at a school in Israel. A little girl from South Africa whose mother was murdered shows her most prized possession - a jewelry box her mother gave her for her seventh birthday, a classic pink and purple plastic toy. The girl stares into it and says, "It can hold secrets too, it's like a temple, it's like a temple." (At this point, I start blubbering into my tissue.)
C) A "girl-next-door cheerleader" who enlisted in the Army at 19, now tormented by PTSD, wracked with guilt over the idea that she has traumatized innocent people (and children) by threatening them with her machine gun. In an aside that almost slips right past, she says she was considered a model female soldier, not in least part because she took the sexual harassment uncomplainingly.
D) A Jordanian man whose wedding reception was suicide-bombed, killing 27 members of his family. He now devotes his life to opposing Muslim terrorism, attempting to directly confront those who plan and execute these attacks, especially trying to make them understand that they especially shouldn't be killing other Muslims. His quest seems somewhat futile, as the terrorists he confronts seem fairly comfortable with the collateral damage.
Any one of these moving films would provide much to digest, to spark a consideration of man's inhumanity to man, the nature of good vs. evil, etc., but all in one day it added up to too much. But how can you turn away?
Providing some relief from the parade of misery, the animated shorts were engaging, the best being "Let's Pollute" (by former Pixar person Geefwee Boedoe), a parody of postwar educational films promoting consumption as the American way. "Always buy TWICE what you need! NEVER use the same thing TWICE! Waste TWICE as much as you did yesterday! NEVER think TWICE about it! You can ALWAYS care less!" (I'l admit I slept through "The Gruffalo", apparently based on a popular picture book.) "Day and Night" is a Pixar short you may have seen with "Toy Story 3". "Madagaskar, carnet de voyage" by Bastein Dubois was the most purely enjoyable, an 11-minute beautifully illustrated travel journal brought to life. Made one want to run home and pull out the watercolors and pastels. In "The Lost Thing", set in a familiarly bleak future/past dystopia of mysterious grey factories oozing black smog, a young man finds a half-amimal, half-machine creature that looks like a cross between a bathysphere and an octopus, and finds it it's rightful place in a magical world beyond the dead-end street filled with whimsical kites, coffeepots, and chalk drawings. Split the difference between Tim Burton, "Wallace and Gromit", and "Brazil" and you've got the gist of it.
In the live action fiction shorts, "The Crush", an eight-year-old boy threatens his teacher's fiance' with a gun. It's played for laughs. I found it tasteless. "God of Love" is a funny black and white student film about a dorky Brooklynite who takes over for Cupid.
I'm glad I went, but I can't really bring myself to watch another movie tonight.
The documentary shorts I mentioned are, in order, "Sun Come Up", "Strangers No More", "Poster Girl", and "Killing in the Name".
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