Each year, for a few years now, the five Oscar-nominated live action short films are packaged together and shown into theatres starting a few weeks before the Academy Awards show. This year’s package is strong, with two films from Quebec, and one each from the UK, the US, and Spain. They range from a very quiet and beautiful mediation on love among different generations — forbidden in one generation and accepted in another; to a tense phone conversation between a mother in Spain and her child in France who may or may not be in grave danger; to a very disturbing drama based on police transcripts of a 1993 incident in which two 10-year-old boys kidnapped and murdered a 2-year old (the “James Bulger” case); to a family drama that veers quickly into extreme racial hatred and revenge (with quite the ending). One of the Canadian films — called Fauve — I didn’t see the point of, but the other four more than make up for that miss. (Subtitles.)
