Oscar contenders bring pain, misery

Apparently, members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences documentary branch, who choose the nominees for best documentary short and feature every year, believe that if a film makes you feel awful, it must be great art. That specious argument is reflected in the nominees for this year’s best documentary short – a parade of pain and misery.

• “The Reaper” (“La Parka”), a film recalling Georges Franju’s landmark 1949 nonfiction short “Le sang des betes,” depicts the working conditions of Efrain, a butcher at a slaughterhouse in Mexico, who is nicknamed “The Reaper” by his co-workers. The film is set in a hellish, fly-infested, mechanized abattoir, where all the tools and machinery are designed for harvesting and disposing of the flesh and blood of doomed cattle. Efrain, who narrates, tells us of the tears shed by the animals he executes all day long.

• In the Polish nominee “Our Curse,” a film that has arguably more in common with reality TV than a documentary, we meet a young Polish couple trying to come to terms with raising an infant born with “Ondine’s curse,” a genetic disorder that causes the child to stop breathing during sleep, requiring a lifetime on a ventilator. A scene in which the parents change the suffering boy’s breathing tube is one of the most disturbing I have ever seen.

• “Joanna,” another grim Polish entry, records the last months of young cancer patient Joanna and her attempt to share as much of herself as possible with her precocious 5-year-old son during her last days. The film is beautifully photographed, and Joanna herself is remarkably photogenic for someone so close to death, but “Joanna” is arguably entirely too decorative.

• U.S. entry “White Earth,” another grim-fest, is set in a North Dakota town where the population spiked when oil field jobs became available to recession-stricken residents. Voice-over is provided in one case by a boy who came with his father and, for reasons not explained, spends his day playing video games in his trailer rather than attending school.

• I was not able to see a fifth entry, “Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1,” a film featuring “despondent servicemen dealing with emotional, physical and financial troubles.”