“Bestia”Hugo Covarrubias, director, and Tevo Diaz, producer joined “Coded: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker”Ryan White, director “Lynching Postcards: Token of a Great Day” director Christine Turner; “The Criminals” director Serhat Karaaslan; and “The Musician” director Reza Riahi and producer Eleanor Coleman for ’s awards season discussion on some of the short films that made this year’s Oscars Shortlist.
Turner’s “Lynching Postcards: Token of a Great Day” looks back at the history of lynching in America through the ways they’ve been documented on souvenir postcards from 1880 to 1968.
Turner described how Turner said that photographers would take photos of the lynchings to create postcards which people could send to their family and friends. She claims that although the imagery was a. “graphic,” she tried to focus viewers’ eyes on the amount of people attending the lynchings and the fact that families were there, rather than the lynching itself, to properly contextualize the point in time.
“We’re going beyond the brutality of the body itself, but that is also part of what I want viewers to confront,”She spoke. “The imagery, in some ways, really speaks for itself, and I wanted viewers to have to reckon and with that, and therefore reckon with our history and hopefully, come to a better understanding about our present as well.”
“Coded: The Hidden Love of J.C. Leyendecker”Another documentary that reveals the hidden messages in J.C. Leyendecker’s advertising work, a queer artist who was one the most well-known American artists of the 20th Century, is available here. History has been largely ignored.
Ryan White, Director, talked about how Leyendecker subtly used homoerotic imagery to engage the LGBTQ+ community in his advertisements. White explained that the film’s core is a documentary. “love story.”
“It’s somewhat of a tragic love story, in the sense that, just as J.C. Leyendecker was coding his imagery in his advertisements in the sort of secret language speaking to the gay community, his relationship as well, was coded and hidden in a way,”He said. Because there wasn’t much of a visual record of Leyedecker’s life, the short film was partially animated to tell a complete story.
“Bestia”It is a stop motion film that depicts Ingrid’s life as a secret agent in Chile’s military dictatorship. The film explores her relationship to everything, from her dog, to her personal fears.
Inside every beast lives a victim,” Covarrubias said. I believe that in this case, Ingrid… is also a kind of victim of the totalitarian machine that reigned in Chile in the ’70s during the military dictatorship, so we think so much about the banality of evil.”
“The Musician”This is also a stop motion short made from paper cutouts. It follows a couple from ancient Persia, who are separated by an attack earlier in life, but reunite when the musician is invited to perform at Mongol castle, where the woman he is in love has been kept.
“I think that the thing that really resonates is the resilience of people,”Coleman. “The resilience of artists, the resilience of musicians, the resilience of regular citizens who undergo unbelievable trauma and continue to make their art. That’s exactly what happens to this main character. In that way, ‘The Musician’ is a link to people today.”
“The Criminals”This is a story about a young couple who tries to book a room in a hotel to spend the night together. It takes place in late night in Turkey. They try to get around the restrictions after they are refused entry to any hotels because they do not have a marriage certificate. As a result, the film devolves into a commentary on surveillance and hypocrisy as well as freedom. Director Serhat Karaslan claims that the title of his film is a “gift”Their translators, since the original title was not the same, but renaming it “The Criminals”People who are judging the young couple should also be held accountable for their morality.
“We liked [the title] because it’s questioning who are the criminals,” Karaaslan explained. “It makes it ironic and it makes it more meaningful when there’s no crime. And in the film, there’s no crime.”
You can see an excerpt of the panel below. Click to view the complete panel. Here.