Documentary shorts tell powerful tales

Where does it say that works nominated for the Academy Award for best documentary short film must display all the subtlety of getting hit by a truck? Is a lighthearted work of genius automatically disqualified?

This year’s five nominees are divided into two programs for screenings.

Program A

A pretty single mother named Garmai tells and shows us what it is like to be part of a Red Cross team collecting bodies of Ebola victims in Liberia in “Body Team 12.”

In “A Girl in the River,” we meet a disfigured young Pakistani woman who was shot in the face and left to die in a river by her father and uncle in a so-called “honor killing” attempt. She survived and was ultimately coerced to forgive her attackers. But listening to her despicable father justify his actions may make you sick.

“Last Day of Freedom” is unique insofar as it is an animated depiction of a man named Bill Babbitt, who tells us the story of his beloved brother Manny. A Vietnam veteran, Manny suffered from PTSD, and Bill was eventually forced to turn the troubled man into the police for murder.

Program B

“Chau, Beyond the Lines,” a portrait of Vietnamese children with terrible birth defects due to the Agent Orange defoliant used by U.S. forces during the war in Vietnam. One of them, a boy named Chau, dreams of being an artist and becoming self-sufficient.

The best of the lot by far is arguably also the most harrowing, “Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah.” Directed by Adam Benzine, the film features Marcel Ophuls, New Yorker film critic Richard Brody and “Shoah” director Lanzmann talking about the 12-year, at times extremely dangerous struggle to make and edit Lanzmann’s 10-hour Holocaust masterpiece “Shoah.”