VIFF Connect brings a world of Oscar-nominated shorts to home screens to April 29
Check out the trailer below for a sneak peek at contenders in live action, documentary, and animated categories
The satirical Two Distant Strangers takes a Groundhog Day-like look at police racism in the U.S.
Yes-People takes a colourful look at Icelandic neighbours.
VIFF Connect is streaming all the Oscar-nominated short films in animated, documentary, and live-action categories until April 29.
It’s a chance to travel the world from your living room, to urban America, Hong Kong, Iceland, the West Bank, and beyond. Find your own favourites amid more than a dozen offerings that are competing at the Academy Awards, which happen this year on April 25.
Note than an Oscar’s Voting Survey is going out to anyone who purchases a ticket to the Oscar Shorts Program. You’ll get to vote for which film you think will take home the Academy Award in each category. And if you submit and guess correctly, you’ll be entered into a draw for a Silver VIFF+ membership. The survey closes April 25, 5pm PST.
The three packages are available to view individually for $9 per category, or as a three-pack for $21.
Animated highlights include Gísli Darri Halldórsson and Arnar Gunnarsson's warmly humorous Yes-People, which takes you to the colourful community that lives in an Icelandic apartment building; the only dialogue is that country’s single-syllable word for “yes”. Elsewhere, Madeline Sharafian and Michael Capbarat's Burrow, follows an adorable rabbit who digs herself deeper and deeper into a hole before she learns to ask for help. On the darker end of the spectrum, If Anything Happens I Love You takes a poetic look at the fallout and grief from gun violence in the U.S.
In the live-action category, two shorts look at issues of big-city America in different ways: Two Distant Strangers is a Groundhog Day-like allegory about police racism in the U.S., while in Feeling Through, a broke teen looking for shelter has a life-changing encounter with a deaf-blind man. Another pair, White Eye and The Present, take provocative explorations of the day-to-day tensions in Israel. And note that acclaimed actor Oscar Isaac stars in a dark and low-key prison comedy called The Letter Room, written and directed by his wife Elvira Lind.
And the documentary category brings you real-life stories from around the globe. Amid the more uplifting is A Concerto Is a Conversation's uplifting story of a a virtuoso jazz musician who tracks his family's lineage through his 91-year-old grandfather. Elsewhere, Do Not Split offers up a harrowing view from inside the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, while Hunger Ward looks unflinchingly at children starving amid Yemen’s ongoing war.
There is much more to inspire the mind and heart, with the full program and information here.
Post sponsored by VIFF