Oscar-nominated shorts take you from clay huts in Kabul to a Danish karaoke bar, at VIFF Centre until March 25
Animated, documentary, and live-action offerings gathered from around the world
Three Songs for Benazir
Affairs of the Art
VIFF Centre screens Oscar-nominated live-action shorts until March 25, and Oscar-nominated animated shorts until March 23
SCREENINGS OF OSCAR-NOMINATED shorts at the VIFF Centre this month open up a world of experiences.
Amid the documentary works, Three Songs for Benazir will fill your heart; it follows a young man who lives in a displaced-persons camp in Kabul with his wife, building clay bricks, singing to his new wife, and dreaming of joining the army. The camera finds beauty set against the bleak, like a shiny marriage bracelet discarded on a mud floor.
Live-action shorts take you from On My Mind, Dane Martin Strange-Hansen’s moving film about a man’s plea to sing at a bar’s karaoke machine for his late wife to the heart-pounding The Long Goodbye, set in a dystopian near future where a British South Asian family is rounded up by thugs; Riz Ahmed stars in the latter.
On the animation program, highlights include Robin Robin—the gorgeously felty-handmade, impossibly cute new stop-motion short from the U.K. creators of Shaun the Sheep; it tells the story of a robin raised by mice who longs to sneak into a house at Christmas.
And Oscar-winning director Joanna Quinn's Affairs of the Art, from the NFB, is a wonderfully warped look at a Welsh family whose weird members obsess about everything from screw threads to pet taxidermy. The swirling sketchy animation, an ode to the tale's mother and her love of drawing, is something to behold.
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