Nominated documentary short films are all winners
BIG subjects will come in small packages Friday when the American Cinematheque screens the four Academy Award-nominated documentary shorts. The powerful, densely informative films, ranging from 27 to 40 minutes, tell stories from Africa, Asia and the U.S.
The tragic end of a South African photojournalist is at the center of Dan Krauss' probing "The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club." As part of a fearless alliance of journalists, Carter was a dashing figure who dodged bullets to chronicle the violence in the townships of Johannesburg in the years before apartheid ended.
Going abroad, he captured an iconic image of a starving Sudanese girl being stalked by a vulture. The photo, which ran in the New York Times, earned Carter a 1994 Pulitzer Prize but also drew criticism from those who saw it as exploitative. The unraveling of a man haunted by condemnation and years of photographing pain and death is effectively depicted by Krauss through interviews with Carter's family and colleagues.
Kimberlee Acquaro and Stacy Sherman went to Africa for the subject of their film, "God Sleeps in Rwanda." The film, narrated by Rosario Dawson, profiles five Rwandan women who survived the country's ethnic cleansing and found themselves in a world that had completely changed.
Their families murdered, themselves victims of rape, the women became part of a workforce that was now 70% female. The genocide that tore the country apart has had the strangely beneficial effect of empowering the women, providing employment opportunities and roles in government that never previously existed. In a society ravaged by AIDS and still reeling from violence, Acquaro and Sherman sound an inspiring note of hope and optimism.
The consequences from the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945, are documented in Steven Okazaki's "The Mushroom Club." In returning to the subject of his 1980 film, "Survivors," Okazaki balances history with contemporary issues, including a resurgence of Japanese nationalism and the ways men and women who survived the blast deal with their physical and emotional scars.
The moving film takes its title from a group formed by a journalist after World War II to benefit the "children of the bomb." Now in their 60s, many of them are mentally challenged, the effects of their mothers' exposure to radiation. Most poignantly, an elderly man wonders what will happen to his daughter, whose mental capacity is that of a 2-year-old, once he is gone.
