If the animation category is rife with aesthetic splendor, the dramatic category is far more uneven. Three of the nominees — Asad, about a young Somali boy attempting to choose between life as a pirate or as a fisherman; Buzkashi Boys, in which two young Afghan kids dream of becoming stars at the game of buzkashi (a variation of polo played with a dead goat); and Curfew, concerning a down-and-out loser who interrupts his suicide attempt to care for his young niece — milk youthful distress for melodramatic pathos. Manipulative heartstring-tugging is also characteristic of Henry, an Amour-lite saga of an old man increasingly aware of his own Alzheimer's. (It's still wrenching, though.)
Far more entrancing is Death of a Shadow, the story of a killed World War I soldier tasked, in the afterlife, with photographing the shadows of the dead so he can receive a second chance at life — a vignette less moving for its depiction of sacrifice in service of love than for its striking, melancholic Terry Gilliam–by-way-of–Jean-Pierre Jeunet sci-fi style.
Leave it to the documentary field to truly wrestle with hardship and mortality, with the five nominees linked by their shared interest in struggles to survive. Whether it's Rwandan children making an epic trip to seek heart surgery in the Sudan in Open Heart, cancer-stricken women searching for companionship and catharsis at a local beauty shop in Mondays at Racine, or retired Florida senior citizens coping with old age and loss in Kings Point, these nonfiction shorts shine a light on universal issues of suffering, solace and the strength it takes to overcome adversity. Despite its overreliance on impressionistic interludes and increasingly intolerable female crooning on the soundtrack, however, Inocente is a powerhouse. The first-person account of a 15-year-old homeless girl grappling with a mother who, years earlier, tried to kill her, all while working on an art show that affords potential future opportunities to escape her difficult circumstances, it's an affecting and endearing portrait of a girl whose voice deserves to be heard.