Great documentaries are about content, sure. If you don’t have the goods for an interesting story, the slickest presentation in the world won’t save your nonfiction bacon.
But leave room for perfect tone, as well, when judging if a true story is well-told. Sometimes filmmakers are so absorbed by the subject that the documentary plays as if they are walking beside you at a favorite haunt, and pointing out the important sights along the way. The production may be arty or crude, slapdash or polished, but the feel is personal, and overwhelming.
From the first narrated moments of the Oscar-nominated short documentary “The Mushroom Club,” tone marries itself to subject. Filmmaker Steven Okazaki’s voice gently introduces us to the modern city of Hiroshima, and we immediately appreciate his quiet pitch. Hiroshima, like Nagasaki, deserves such gentle handling. Okazaki signals immediately he will be observing this nuclear-ravaged city with kindness, remorse and integrity.
There is no clear pattern to Okazaki’s investigation, other than his personal interests. He takes his camera where he feels like going. To the river banks of Hiroshima’s intersecting waterways, where A-bomb survivors look for melted buttons and other human detritus from the 1945 explosion that killed more than 100,000 Japanese. To the studio of an animator who draws painful cartoons of the inferno and fiercely dares anyone to forget the horrors. To blissfully silent parks that seem to still absorb the screams of the dying, six decades later.
Okazaki has already won a short-documentary Oscar for a piece about a Caucasian woman interned along with Japanese at American prison camps during World War II. The breadth of his work is impressive, yet so is the depth: He has written and filmed Hiroshima before for other important movies. He is one of those filmmakers we would gladly accompany to any corner of the planet, such is his curiosity about interesting and emotional things. (The Mushroom Club is a group of families in Hiroshima with children suffering severe medical problems from the blast’s after-effects.)
Okazaki’s poetic movie is part of the Oscar Shorts program at Starz FilmCenter, and plays with the other three brief documentaries nominated for Sunday night’s awards.
“The Death of Kevin Carter” is a chilling portrait of a swashbuckling South African photographer and the death throes of the apartheid system he struggled to portray. Long before Carter became famous for a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, he was tormented by the scenes of police beatings, revenge killings and other mayhem that exploded before his camera lens.
Described as a lively friend and a childlike innocent, Carter often wondered if he shouldn’t be helping the victims rather than capturing them on film. His doubts only increased after the Pulitzer, for a shot of famine in the Sudan.
Two other admirable shorts round out the bill: “God Sleeps in Rwanda” and “A Note of Triumph,” about World War II radio poet Norman Corwin.
*** | “Oscar Nominated Short Documentaries”
NOT RATED|2 hours, 10 minutes|DOCUMENTARY|The four short documentaries nominated for this year’s Academy Awards: “God Sleeps in Rwanda,” “The Mushroom Club,” “The Death of Kevin Carter” and “A Note of Triumph” |Opens today at Starz FilmCenter at the Tivoli.
