We’ve decided that in addition to our LEARNING CENTER and our MORE OR LESS sections of our monthly blog, we want to add a new section each month that reviews short films. Barbara enjoys going to the live action and animated short film Oscar nominees each year and we both have always enjoyed short stories as well, so why not make it a plan to see some of the ones available to us.

SHORT STOP

This month we watched three short films for the letter N; unfortunately we didn’t have the time to explore any O shorts.

NIGHT AND FOG

Barb watched this one. It is a French documentary short film that was made 10 years after the liberation of the camps. At first, she was put off by the monotone narration but after a while she felt that seeing all the horror of the camps was made even more powerful with that voice because one wasn’t distracted by it. And when they showed the arrival at the camps, they played very dramatic music – almost the kind that you heard in the horror movies of the 30s. She initially thought that was weird but then realized it IS a horror movie. We won’t specify the scenes they show from the camps; suffice it to say they were some of most horrifying she’s seen.

In reading about the making of the film and the resistance from the French veterans associations which wanted them to create a film that would honor the French resistance fighters instead, the filmmakers stated “The genocide of the Jews was treated in French remembrance as more of a side issue” and indeed, Barbara remembered thinking the same thing when she visited a WWII museum in France which had one very little section that even mentioned the Holocaust. All in all it may not be for everyone, but she felt it a film worth viewing.

NIGHT MAIL

Mixed opinions on this one. Although Laura was impressed with the artistic and technical aspects achieved for a short that was filmed close to 100 years ago, she found the film a bit dull but Barbara found that the process of delivering mail during that time was fascinating. This, too, was a documentary and was about the overnight journey of the postal special train from London to Scotland in the 1930s. Along the route the local postmen wait by the tracks to give their mail to the postal special. Local trains would drop off mail into a net that is gathered by postmen. The postmen then put all the mail into a big container that they string up, and when the postal special comes by it hits the parcel in just the right way and the mailbags go flying into the train. They got over 1000 bags of mail that way. It just blew Barbara’s mind. Another interesting thing about the film, though, is the poem sequence that they had at the end, inserted when one of the creators asked, “we documented the “machinery” of delivering letters, but what about the people who write them and the people who get them?”

This is the Night Mail crossing the border

Bringing the cheque and the postal order

Letters for the rich, letters for the poor

The shop at the corner and the girl next door.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,           

Letters of joy from girl and boy,

Receipted bills and invitations

To inspect new stock or to visit relations,

And applications for situations,

And timid lovers’ declarations,

And gossip, gossip from all the nations,

Written on paper of every hue,

The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,

The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,

The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,

Clever, stupid, short and long,

The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

NIGHT RIDE

This film was both of our favorites and was nominated for the Oscar for best live action short film in 2023.

It starts with Ebba, who has dwarfism, waiting in the cold for a tram to arrive. When it does, the conductor leaves for the restroom and prevents her from boarding without him being present. Due to the cold weather, Ebba sneaks onboard anyway, and curiously plays with the conductor’s controls trying to close the doors. When she accidentally causes the tram to move, she decides to keep going in order to avoid reprisal from the outraged conductor. We don’t want to give away the details of the story but needless to say, Ebba encounters a bit of trouble with the passengers on her ride and ironically it is the shortest person who stands the tallest.