Oscar Docs(Sat., Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m., New Jersey State Museum, 205 W. State St., Trenton, N.J.) Even though they regularly produce some of the most impassioned acceptance speeches, the short film awards are the black hole of the Academy Awards broadcast, the moment when you get a fresh drink or curse their effect on your otherwise perfect Oscar-pool ballot. But at last there's a safe and legal way to get the edge on your friends and colleagues, and see some noteworthy short documentaries as well. As a benefit for the Trenton Film Festival (coming May 5), the Trenton Film Society has locked down all four of this year's nominees for a special screening. (Tickets are available at www.trentonfilmsociety.org.)
A Note of Triumph
A State of Mind
There's not much indication in the Academy's nominees of the way filmmakers use the short form as a testing ground: All four are the kind of worthy talking-head profiles that used to dominate the long-form category. The worthiest is God Sleeps in Rwanda, a profile of five women adapting to life in post-genocide Rwanda, although the effect is less a collective portrait than a one-from-every-column survey. The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang-Bang Club takes a sharper imprint of political turmoil through the eyes of a white South African photojournalist. Carter, part of a cadre of gung-ho shooters who covered the bloody repression of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, won a Pulitzer in 1994 for a picture of an emaciated Sudanese girl shadowed by a hungry vulture, but the acclaim was preceded by months of outrage and abuse from readers who assumed that Carter had snapped the girl and simply walked away (a point on which the film is oddly fuzzy). Two months after winning his Pulitzer, Carter took his own life. Dan Krauss' documentary leaves a few perhaps inevitably gaping holes in Carter's downward slide, and punts on the larger issues Carter's case dredges up. But it's a story worth telling, and well told.
Steven Okazaki's The Mushroom Club is a disorganized, practically amateurish look at Hiroshima 60 years after the atomic blast that must have been nominated on subject matter alone. But Eric Simonson's A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin ends the program on an unqualified high. Now a forgotten figure, Corwin was the unofficial poet laureate of WWII America. His 1941 radio broadcast "We Hold These Truths" captured 60 million listeners, more than half the nation, and On a Note of Triumph, his exclamatory celebration of VE-Day ("Take a bow, G.I. Take a bow, little guy"), was praised by Carl Sandburg as "one of the great American poems." A flamboyant performer in the mold of Orson Welles, who himself once intoned Corwin's muscular verse, Corwin sported a pencil moustache and a shock of electrified black hair; a vintage photo spread testifies to contemporary fascination with his Stokowskian gesticulations. Not surprisingly, most of those who pay testimony to Corwin's greatness are well into their golden years—Robert Altman, Norman Lear and a near-deaf Studs Turkel among them. But the generous excerpts from Corwin's broadcasts blow the dust off his legend with hurricane force, and Corwin himself demonstrates a still-sharp wit. Corwin's recordings are available through his Web site, and Simonson makes an airtight case for his overdue rediscovery.
Campfire (Sat., Feb. 25, 8 p.m., $12-$15, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) The Israeli Film Festival, which runs weekends through the end of March, kicks off with Joseph Cedar's lumpy melodrama. Set in 1981, the film stars Michaela Eshet as Rachel, a widowed single mother who wants to move her two daughters into a nascent West Bank settlement. Cedar lampoons the settlers, an unforgiving, judgmental lot who clutch desperately at their hats as a gust of wind almost blows them off the spot of their would-be outpost, and puts forth a blunt critique of Israeli patriarchy. Rachel can't sell her late husband's car without pretending he's still alive, since the male buyers only want to deal with another man, and her youngest daughter, Tami (engagingly gawky Hani Furstenberg), is the subject of ugly harassment from a gang of teenage boys. Matters come to a head, and hypocrisy flourishes, when the boys gang-grope Tami and then brand her a slut. Suddenly the settlement committee's religious rectitude starts to seem a lot like closed-ranks misogyny. Cedar is a clumsy, even artless filmmaker, but Campfire hits home almost in spite of itself.
A State of Mind ($29.95 DVD) If you walked in on Daniel Gordon's documentary about North Korea's mass games, you might think your TV was tuned to the Olympics. A former sports journalist, Gordon shoots his teenage gymnasts in the sunlit style of NBC's soft-focus featurettes, but you're unlikely to hear NBC's athletes talk about the U.S. "maneuvering to suppress the smiles" in their homeland. Designed to honor the Dear Leader and provide televisual proof of Communist unity, the mass games are a Busby Berkeley spectacular of stadium proportions, thousands of bodies moving in selfless synchronization. Gordon, a British sports journalist whose previous documentary, The Game of Their Lives, flashed back to a landmark soccer match between Britain and North Korea, touts his unprecedented access to one of the world's most closed-off countries, providing what he says is the first account ever given to a Westerner of the Arduous March, the devastating famine and near-collapse that followed the death of Kim Il-Sung. His young athletes, aged 9 and 13, practice 10 hours a day in the months before the mass games, and speak vividly of the way "group power develops and individualism completely disappears." Gordon's narration has a trace of the tendentious, but A State of Mind is refreshingly light-handed, notwithstanding its subjects' anti-U.S. sentiment. "No wonder even arrogant Americans tremble with fear when they see that," a sweet old grandmother remarks as the mass games loop-broadcast on state TV. Gordon's occasionally credulous approach leaves questions unanswered, but it's preferable to the unilateral bias of CNN's Paula Zahn, who in an attached interview asks Gordon, "So, do they hate the United States, or do they fear the United States?"
Misc. Picks: Found-footage bipacker Luis Recorder screens and lectures at the University of the Arts (Thu., 7 p.m.). Secret Cinema goes softcore with the last of its Valentine's double bills, pairing Radley Metzger's The Lickerish Quartet and the Metzger recut and retitled import The Libertine (Fri., 8 p.m., Moore College of Art & Design). The Jewish Film Festival at Gershman Y rescreens the snowed-out Live and Become (Sun., 2 p.m.) and pairs Purity and Keep Not Silent, documentaries on female purification rituals and Orthodox lesbians (Mon., 7 p.m.).
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