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.”
