When some people hear the word “documentary,” a wall goes up and their eyes glaze over. Documentaries often get a bad rap for being boring or preachy, the kinds of films that you would watch in your AP History class that are so stale, you’d rather just be doing actual work. It’s no coincidence that the documentaries and docuseries turned out in quick succession by major streaming forces like Netflix are designed to be loud, outrageous, and over the top. This kind of programming is relatively inexpensive to make, but in order to reel in audiences, you’ve got to hook them with something flashy.
It’s unlikely that you’ll find anything like The Tinder Swindler or The Price of Glee on the Oscar Nominee shortlist. Instead, the Academy tends to keep things a little more classic when it comes to its choice of documentaries to highlight. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that these films will shake that archaic notion to equate documentaries with an afternoon siesta. It just means that these films acknowledged by the most vaunted cinematic voting body should have something enduring to say.
Major significance can come in small packages too. While feature-length Oscar-nominated documentaries can feel heady or inaccessible (sometimes literally—anyone waiting to see All the Beauty and the Bloodshed still has to wait a couple more weeks to stream it on HBO Max), their abbreviated counterparts provide a world’s worth of information in less than an hour. Indeed, the five documentary shorts up for the Oscar this year are all working in top form to pack as much substance as possible into a tight runtime.
While animated and live-action shorts are great ways to find hidden talents in small-scale cinema, documentary shorts let us glimpse into less well-trodden parts of the world and humanity. Each of these shorts will teach you something about yourself or, perhaps, our society as a whole. Maybe even both! Because that’s what great documentaries do: They challenge us to examine our minute impact in the scope of a much bigger and ever-changing world. And 2023’s Oscar-nominated documentary shorts just happen to do that in a convenient, bite-sized fashion.
The Elephant Whispers
Coming out of India and streaming on Netflix, The Elephant Whispers is a stunning tale of the way love can transcend human boundaries. In the Theppakadu Elephant Camp—one of Asia’s oldest elephant sanctuaries—animal caretakers Bomman and Bellie fall in love, while raising injured orphan elephants. Their passion for these majestic creatures brings them closer together, as they begin to care for a young elephant, Raghu, like he were their own child.
The Elephant Whispers is a story of both loss and hope regained. Bellie has experienced significant grief in her life, losing both her husband and her daughter. When she cried, Raghu wiped her tears with his trunk. And that’s just skimming the surface of what these intelligent creatures are capable of. The elephants in Bellie and Bomman’s care learn to love as humans do, empowering the same affection in their reliable caretakers. It’s a truly beautiful tale, only as long as an episode of your favorite sitcom. Just make sure to turn off that obnoxious English dubbing that Netflix will play over the film as a default.
The Elephant Whispers is streaming on Netflix.
Stranger at the Gate
An American entry into the race, Stranger at the Gate tells the story of PTSD-stricken veteran Richard McKinney, whose deeply ingrained, violent hatred of Muslim Americans is transformed by an act of love. During McKinney’s time in the military, he was taught to view the people he killed as “anything but human.” After 9/11, McKinney’s hostility toward the Muslim community in his home state of Indiana worsened under the inextricable rhetoric of his military training. McKinney’s loathing took him to the brink of a breakdown, resulting in him planning to bomb an Indiana Islamic Center.
However, things take a turn in McKinney’s life when he goes to scope out his “enemy” for himself. McKinney is welcomed into the Islamic Center, embraced by the community. After 25 years of boiling hate, his entire life changed with just eight weeks of care from people he simply had failed to understand. But while Stranger at the Gate is a harrowing depiction of state-sponsored, militaristic brainwash, it poses a troubling and confounding thesis. The film places the responsibility of kindness toward strangers upon Islamic community members, not the white person who went in looking to assassinate them. Stranger at the Gate centers the evil it rebukes, making for a shockingly misguided short that should be kept far away from Oscar history.
Stranger at the Gate is available on YouTube.
How Do You Measure a Year?
The last of this year’s Oscar-nominated docs to hit streaming, this DIY-esque film finds filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt sitting down with his daughter on her birthday, every year for 17 years, to ask her the same series of questions. It’s sort of like the more humble version of Billie Eilish’s annual Vanity Fair interview.
As the years tick by, we see Rosenblatt’s daughter, Ella, grow up from a toddler to a teenager. And in turn, we get the opportunity to watch Ella transform from a product of her surroundings to a young woman with her own thoughts, ideas, and deep emotions. Even for anyone threatened by an existential crisis when pondering the passage of time (like yours truly), How Do You Measure a Year? is a fascinating look at just how quickly life really does fly. It’s also a reminder of the importance of loving unconditionally in every single, valuable second.
How Do You Measure a Year? is streaming on HBO Max.
Haulout
Haulout, which is also streaming on YouTube, is a documentary short out of the U.K.. It follows scientist Maxim Arbugaev’s study of the world’s largest walrus haulout. For the uninitiated, haulout is a term used for when walruses migrate onto land between foraging. Due to warming oceans that have resulted in melting ice caps, walruses have fewer slabs of ice to rest on. Instead, they must all huddle on one small patch of land, causing the limited amount of space to become increasingly crowded.
Haulout is a real bummer, but it’s an important one to watch nonetheless. As the walruses crowd, there’s a bigger risk for trampling and stampeding, meaning that walrus deaths are occurring at higher rates than ever before. Haulout takes a more subtle approach to driving its message home—through remarkable overhead shots and stunning wide-angle lenses which capture the severity of this one sliver of a larger climate crisis. Eventually, the low, droning hum of 95,000 walruses starts to sound more like a deafening cry for change before it’s too late.
Haulout is available on YouTube.
The Martha Mitchell Effect
The Martha Mitchell Effect is the most accessible entry in this year’s Oscar-nominated short doc lineup—both literally and narratively. You can stream it over on Netflix, and you’ll be hooked into it faster than you could say, “Nixon ruined my marriage.” The film explores how Martha Mitchell, the wife of President Richard Nixon’s attorney general and campaign manager, became publicly known as a political firecracker. Mitchell would often call the president, drunk after a party, and explain just how she’d like things done. In 1970s America, when women were still expected to defer to their husbands and be content with homemaking, Mitchell redefined public perceptions.
That’s also when she became a problem for Nixon. After the Watergate scandal, Mitchell was reportedly held prisoner by the Nixon administration for threatening to leak damning information to the press. The story transforms into a fascinating tale of how doing the right thing caused an irreparable schism in Mitchell’s marriage, while making her the face of scandal. Mitchell got the ball rolling on Nixon’s resignation, and that ball’s unstoppable force almost crushed her entirely. The Martha Mitchell Effect is a captivating exploration of the steps that men in power will take to silence women—and the courage it takes to defy them at every turn.
The Martha Mitchell Effect is streaming on Netflix.
