Two Irish films are among the best of this year’s short list of five Oscar nominated live action short films, and both show a particular affinity for the natural wit and lyric sense of place that can be said to characterize that country’s rich storytelling heritage.
Peter McDonald’s “Pentecost” (pictured at top) is a pointed rip very much in the spirit of the current discontent with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church inIreland. Set in 1977 (a time when the church was deep in the mire of unchecked sex abuse), Damian is an altar boy and a die-hard fan of theLiverpoolsoccer team. The team is in the European Cup final, but Damian is grounded for a hilarious “foul” involving the incense burner committed during a recent Sunday mass. When the Archbishop comes to their small town, Damian has a chance to redeem himself and earn back his opportunity to watch theLiverpoolgame. Construing the back-room life of alter boys as the clubhouse of a soccer team, “Pentecost” is quick dose of wry, punk wit fueled by a last second movement of the spirit.
Another Irish movie, “The Shore” is a warmer, more emotionally expansive film – if a little too sweet at times – which stars the great Ciarán Hinds as a Irishman returning to his native Belfast after 25 years in America. His adult daughter meets her relations, and soon discovers a secret long buried in the past that forces a reunion between her father and his best friend and former fiancé. Directed by Belfast native Terry George, who wrote and directed Hotel Rwanda and penned the screenplay for In the Name of the Father, “The Shore” is a salty, wistful piece rich with colloquial voice. You can almost smell the bog.
The rest of the pack of shorts is rounded out by movies from three different countries. The American entry is “Time Freak,” a giddy sci-fi spoof, something like Richardson-native Shane Carruth’s Primer meets Seinfeld. A young Brooklynite invents a time machine, planning on realizing his dream of traveling to ancient Rome, but he ends up obsessing over perfecting his mundane daily interactions – an altercation with a dry cleaner, a chance encounter with a pretty girl – so much so that he is lost in an obsessive cycle of neuroses, a self-inflicted Groundhog Day.
The German/Indian production “Raju” is Max Zähle first film, and it plays like a movie that wants to receive a feature treatment at some point. A German couple is inIndiato adopt an orphan boy, but after they lose him to the chaos of the urban jungle, the father discovers that their adoption was not all that it seemed. That sets up a difficult moral choice that pits husband against wife. While Zähle does well quickly rope us in to his film’s heightened sense of anxiety, wrapping a lot of story into “Raju’s” brief 24 minutes, it is a movie whose emotional impact would be heightened by allowing the story’s complications more time to ferment.
“Tuba Atlantic,” is another first film, this one from Norwegian director Hallvar Witzø. It is a black comedy with a twist of Terry Gilliam-style surrealism. A old man finds out he has six days to live, and between the daily chore of shooting the pesky seagulls with a machine gun and dodging the “death angel,” a teenage girl sent by a local Christian group to help the man prepare for his doom, the old man takes one last swipe at realizing a dream of creating a massive tuba whose sound could be heard across the Atlantic. “Tuba Atlantic” is a strange, but enjoyable little movie that manages to pack a Don Quixote-like spirit into a lean, tightly-wound metaphor for life’s hopes and loses.
