- White Earth
Tonight the Music Box Theatre will screen all five of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts in two separate programs. The first, which contains the Polish character portrait Joanna and an American social-issue doc called Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press, screens at 7 PM (and repeats this coming Saturday and on Sunday 2/15 at noon). The second, which screens at 9 PM (and again this coming Sunday and on Saturday 2/14 at noon), features the remaining three: White Earth, a tone poem about oil-field laborers in North Dakota; The Reaper, a study of a stoic Mexican slaughterhouse worker; and Our Curse, another Polish submission, a personal essay by the parents of a child with a rare, life-threatening illness. I wasn’t able to preview Crisis Hotline, but I consider the other four to be worthy discussion-starters. Each one presents challenging ethical dilemmas, and at least two led me to question the ethics of their production. All four are unabashedly emotional (which is probably why they attracted the attention of Oscar voters), but the issues they raise with regards to form should make them especially compelling for documentary aficionados.
This feels like a drama in the intimacy it establishes with the subjects, who are shown to be as eloquent as any fictional characters. Still I felt like a bit of a voyeur while I watched Joanna. Compared with a similar project like Frederick Wiseman’s Near Death, which considers the end of life within a larger social context, or Steve James’s Life Itself, which approaches the subject’s death as an entry point to his entire life and career, Kopacz’s documentary is focused almost exclusively on personal catharsis. I wonder what the son will make of this when he grows up—will he resent that the most difficult moments of his childhood became the stuff of classic movie uplift?
