Innocence Lost

Na WeWE

Rarely have I seen a live action shorts in US picture houses. After viewing the 2011 Academy-nominated Live-Action shorts at New York’s IFC Center, it struck me how good they were, and how much we are deprived of a rich mother lode of cinema.

The five nominated live-action films are the best chosen among many for this Oscar category,  either in technicolor or black and white. Live-action shorts demands a  terseness and a control in directing that the script has to obey.  The five nominated films nominated this category run from 18 or 19 to 25 minutes.

Two films — ‘Na Wewe’ [Belgium] and ‘the God of Love’ [US] — direct our attention to history, geography, language and literature, which might have escaped our everyday interests or concerns. They are more adult in story line. On the other ‘the Confession’ [UK], ‘Wish 143’ [UK]  and ‘the Crush’ [Eire] have a wider mass appeal demanding nothing more of us than empathy. They evoke and explore, archetypally, a boy’s awareness, through tragedy, disease, and precocious mischief, of the human condition and the loss of a child’s ‘garden of eden’, with which we can identify.

Finally, mainstream America is missing a lot by the absence of live-action shorts in Hollywood’s standard awful menu of films.

“Awesome dude!”

“My eyes moistened during the showing of the five films. They moved me. I, however, do wish I knew what “Na WeWe” meant.”


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