The fear is in our bodies

Oscar-nominated documentary shorts

Crit

The review in the Times warned all the O-nom'd shorts programs were even more downers than usual, and since the docs are traditionally the most unremittingly depressing, I took the precaution of leaving all razor blades and barbiturates home. But with expectations in the abyss, I left the theater feeling relatively chipper.

• Life Overtakes Me--Though the program starts as dark as the grimmest Grimm tale: refugee children who become so traumatized that they retreat into a comatose condition called resignation syndrome--a situation bizarrely epidemic in Sweden.
• Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if You're a Girl)--This one, whose title is not a metaphor, manages to be simultaneously depressing and exhilarating: Kabul women teaching girls reading, math, and yes, skateboarding--all skills, of course, that have no use for them outside their academic cloister.
• In the Absence--Even more angrymaking than depressing, this film narrates a 2014 ferry disaster that killed more than 300 people, most of them schoolchildren, and the astonishingly inept and blasé response to the crisis by South Korean authorities from the coast guard to the president, who eventually lost her job partly as a result.
• Walk Run Cha-Cha--This story of immigrants from Vietnam is the most upbeat but also the least coherent of the program. Their youthful whirlwind romance was interrupted by Paul's escape with his parents but resumed 6 years later when Millie finally followed. Now they dance competitively.
• St. Louis Superman--Bruce Franks was politically roused by the Michael Brown shooting, and as a state representative he worked for 3 years to pass a bill declaring youth violence an epidemic, and also commemorating his brother, murdered on the street at age 9.