The Martha’s Vineyard Film Center has added two new film programs to its roster this weekend. The five Oscar-nominated animated shorts will play Saturday afternoon, Feb. 7, and Selma, which has earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Song, plays on Friday and Sunday evenings, Feb. 6 and 8. Returning are The Imitation Game and the Oscar-nominated live-action shorts.
With a run time of barely three minutes, A Single Life, by Dutch directors Marieke Blaauw and Joris Oprins, tracks in quick succession the high points in the life of a woman named Pia, after she receives a 45-rpm record with a song that has the power to help her time travel.
From Disney comes Feast, directed by Patrick Osborne, a six-minute, hand-drawn short about a Boston terrier named Winston who loves to eat almost anything. He’s a happy camper as long as his owner James supplements his dog food with junk food. But when James romances a waitress who persuades him to eat healthier food, Winston is not happy. After the couple break up and Winston sees how sad James becomes, he takes matters into his own paws, with surprising results.
A Norwegian entry, Me and My Moulton, is the third Oscar-nominated short by Torill Kove, who won the 2006 Oscar for her short The Danish Poet. In her current, 14-minute short, two girls find that their architect parents don’t fit the conventional role of parents that the girls wish for. The Moulton of the title is a British-made bicycle, built by the originator of the small-wheel model. British animator Daisy Jacobs frames her seven-minute stop-action short, The Bigger Picture, as a tale about the different ways two brothers cope with their aging grandparent.
Filmgoers who attended animator Bill Plympton’s program of animated shorts at last September’s Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival will remember the evocative The Dam Keeper, an Oscar entry by Dutch directors Robert Kondo and Duke Tsutsumi, who have also worked on such Hollywood films as Ratatouille, Toy Story 3, and Ice Age. This handsomely drawn, futuristic short is set in a town that relies on a windmill to keep air pollution away. Its dam keeper is a sad little piglet who is teased and taunted by other schoolchildren, with the exception of a fox who seems to make friends with Pig. The Dam Keeper is well worth a second viewing, and is a likely candidate to win the Oscar in this category.
Four additional animated shorts will fill out the Oscar-nominated program. They are Bill Plympton’s four-minute Footprints, which also played at the 2014 International Film Festival, and concerns a man on a quest for a monster; six-minute Sweet Cocoon, about a caterpillar who has trouble fitting into her cocoon; four-minute Duet, directed by Glen Keane, which tells the story of how two animated characters, Mia and Tosh, find each other; and 11-minute Bus Story, about a driver negotiating treacherous winter roads.
In contrast to the entertaining quick takes of the Oscar-nominated animated shorts, director Ava DuVernay’sfull-length feature, Selma, offers filmgoers a serious and powerful examination of a landmark year in the voting rights struggle for blacks. The year in question is 1965, when Martin Luther King Jr. spearheaded the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., that led to then President Lyndon B. Johnson’s support for passage of the Voting Rights Act. David Oyelowo, who is also appearing currently in A Most Violent Year, humanizes Dr. King rather than turning him into a heroic stereotype. The movie makes room for many of the other important leaders of the civil rights movement, including John Lewis, former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; Andrew Young (André Holland), who later became a U.S. Congressman, the first African-American Ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta; Annie Lee Cooper (Oprah Winfrey), who was arrested after trying to register to vote; Bayard Rustin (Ruben Santiago-Hudson) and Ralph Abernathy (Colman Domingo), who were both active in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Selma belongs in the pantheon of history films that should be seen by all Americans.
Selma, Friday, Feb. 6, and Sunday, Feb. 8, 7:30 p.m.
Oscar-nominated animated shorts, Saturday, Feb. 7, 4 p.m.
Oscar-nominated live-action shorts, Sunday, Feb. 8, 4 p.m.
All films at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center, Tisbury Marketplace, Vineyard Haven. For information and tickets, see mvfilmsociety.com.