The Live Action short category is a complicated one, with some very impactful stories told, often in a semi-documentary style, and they can be brutal. Also common is that you cannot find them on line, in contrast to the availability of the animated and documentary shorts, and so you have to sit through all five of them in one setting, which can be fairly painful on occasion.
This year we lucked out. Three of them were available, and when I got a virtual screening of the group, I watched the other two. My pick in this category is Two Distant Strangers, where an educated and well dressed black man leaves an apartment and is accosted by a white cop and gets shot. But it is Groundhog Day--the same thing happens over and over and over again. It is timely, well done, and so overwhelming traumatic to watch. My second choise is The Present, where a Palestinian man living in the West Bank crosses into Israel to buy a refridgerator for his wife. The dismissive and obnoxious way the young Israeli soldiers treat him is all too beleivable and another one where you think "no wonder they hate us", whomever we are who abuse authority. White Eye is an Israeli movie where a man finds his bike that was stolen outside a butchering operation in a run down part of town. It isn't completely clear it is his, he didn't file a police report, and as things unfold, his insistence on involving the police has a very negative effect he definitely did not want to happen. The Letter Room features Oscar Isaacs as a letter room clerk in a prison who gets overly involved in his work, and Feeling Through is a movie where you feel like something bad is going to happen but it doesn't, revealing a lot more about the viewer than might be supposed.
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