Kiggins, Liberty to show short movies up for Academy Awards

If you’re a movie buff who endeavors to get all your homework done before the annual Academy Awards ceremony reveals industry picks for the best films of the previous year — you’re not done yet. There’s still just a little homework left for you.

Fortunately, the Old Liberty Theater in Camas and the Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver are ready to help, and the films themselves are bite-sized and bundled into three tasty groups.

The 14th annual series of “Oscar Shorts” includes films that are so good, they’ve been nominated for top honors — yet so brief, they never make it to the multiplex for the routine screenings that full-length features enjoy. Most of these Oscar Shorts are between 10 and 20 minutes long; just a few are shorter or longer than that.

Normally, film festivals or the ever-diversifying world of independent online producers, like Netflix, are your only chances to see such short pieces. But over the next couple of weekends, you can see them all on the big screen in Vancouver or Camas. They’ve been grouped by genre: live action (fiction films); animation; and documentary. And within those genres they come in every conceivable flavor, from sweetly funny to deadly serious, from personal to political, from individual to global.

For example, nothing could be more personal, yet more political, than a documentary about the health and social revolution that occurred in one rural Indian village after the arrival of the first sanitary pad dispenser women there have ever seen. The film called “Period. End of Sentence.” follows the women of the village as they launch their own pad-making business, with the help of women half a world away in California.

“It’s the most inspirational of the whole program,” said Richard Beer, the programming director at the Kiggins.

Even more deeply personal-yet-global is “Lifeboat,” a documentary that follows German volunteers as they risk their own lives to rescue Libyan refugees from boats sinking in the Mediterranean Sea. It’s the second film in a refugee trilogy by documentarian Skye Fitzgerald, aimed at putting human faces on an ongoing global crisis that can seem a world away from us.

Equally but differently chilling is “A Night at the Garden,” an astonishing look back at a real event in 1939 that most Americans would rather forget: a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It was attended by 22,000 Nazi supporters who vowed to “take their country back” from Jews and other minorities they didn’t like.

“A Night at the Garden” isn’t a typical voice-over documentary; it simply lets terrifying archival footage speak for itself. Including what happens to a Jewish protestor who runs onstage during the rally.

Heartbreaking and beautiful

Oscar Shorts screenings are a great way for important, overlooked documentaries to get some well-deserved attention — but fun animations and gripping live-action stories are available, too. Each style has its own screening nights at the Old Liberty and Kiggins, so check the schedule on this page and the theaters themselves for updates. (The Kiggins divides the dense documentaries program into two screenings on separate weekends, but this year the Liberty will screen them all in a single 143-minute marathon.)

What could be more fun than a bunch introspective animals, sharing their inner angst in a group therapy session? That’s what happens in “Animal Behavior,” a 14-minute animated short from Canada that Beer called “really funny and clever.” And what could be more gripping than “Skin,” a 20-minute drama based on a real episode in the life of former skinhead Byron Widner?

Beer, a short-film aficionado who takes in hundreds every year as he helps program independent film festivals in Portland and elsewhere, said this year’s Oscar Shorts lineup is full of strong scripts and great performances.

“There are two things that really excite me” about this year’s live-action (fiction) films, he said: One, there are no “celebrity fluff pieces. This year’s films are almost devoid of recognizable faces and are really focused on the story.” And, he said, this year’s lineup features some unusually strong performances by children.

“They all shine. … you might even forget that you are watching (acting), the kids are so good. Several are hard to watch because of the subject matter, but all are extremely powerful.”

Beer’s favorite animation of the year, he said, is something really unusual called “Weekends.”

“It’s a 16-minute dialogue-free film about a little boy who is shuffled back and forth between his divorced parents’ houses,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time and hits home for a lot of people. And the animation is just stunning.”