2021 IN REVIEW
THE YEAR IN NEW YORKER VIDEO
A diverse collection of documentary and narrative shorts, including six short-listed for Academy Awards, reflected important changes in the film industry.
This year, The New Yorker posted forty-six short films—more than ever before, including six that have been short-listed for the Academy Awards. Documentary and narrative, animated and live-action, the films came from a diverse group of men and women who hail from—and shot their movies—all over the world. Their stories bring viewers to a village in China, the Congolese tropical forest, the desert borderlands of Arizona, and other far-flung locations.
New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.
The slate reflected ongoing, significant changes within the film industry. Wider access to production tools has enabled more people to become filmmakers. Documentaries, which used to be dominated by a relatively homogeneous group of creators, are becoming increasingly diverse, with more (and more visible) contributions coming from women and people of color. That evolution, combined with the immersive power of The New Yorker’s narrative shorts, has yielded a series of films that provided understanding of, and occasionally distraction from, another challenging year.
“A Broken House” (short-listed for Documentary Short Subject)
In one scene in Jimmy Goldblum’s documentary about the Syrian architect Mohamad Hafez, Hafez initiates a difficult, even raw conversation with his mother about how their idea of home and family will never be the same after Syria’s civil war. Working against the trope that his home country is a site of nothing but conflict, Hafez builds intricate dioramas of the household interiors that he remembers from his childhood, in Damascus, attempting to recapture the quiet normalcy of gardens, living rooms, clotheslines.
In Sarra El Abed’s documentary short, a group of beauty-shop regulars process political upheaval in Tunisia through lighthearted chat. “They have this way of making anything funny,” El Abed said. For the women in the salon, laughing and joking about the rise of a political force they see as a danger is not only a form of coping but an act of resistance.
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“Affairs of the Art” (short-listed for Animated Short Film)
In their latest animated short, drawn entirely by hand, Joanna Quinn and Les Mills bring to life a middle-aged woman, Beryl, who is energetic, enthusiastic, and, above all, obsessive. Everyone in Beryl’s family is obsessed with something: death, railway systems, or, in Beryl’s case, making art. Their single-mindedness can lead to inconvenience and even injury, but, for Beryl, fanatical focus is the artist’s way.
“Águilas” (short-listed for Documentary Short Subject)
This short documentary, by the U.C.L.A. professors Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Maite Zubiaurre, follows a group of volunteers on a mission of grim compassion. Searching the deserts of California and Arizona, they spend their weekends looking for migrants who have disappeared. The work is gruelling and sometimes dangerous, but they are spurred on by calls from family members of the missing, often from Central America, who cannot carry out the search themselves.
“It definitely fucked me up,” Joe Buffalo says, in this documentary by Amar Chebib, as the legendary skateboarder matter-of-factly sums up the time he spent in Canada’s residential-school system. Such institutions, in both Canada and the U.S., have been in the news this year, following the discoveries of mass graves that underscore the schools’ violent history. The story of Buffalo, born to a family of Samson Cree heritage, is a stark reminder of how recent and living that history is.
“Les Grandes Claques” (“Like the Ones I Used to Know”) (short-listed for Live Action Short Film)
Annie St-Pierre’s live-action short about Christmas after a divorce gets to the heart of the holidays: it’s a time for being with loved ones, but when the shape of a family changes togetherness becomes fraught. Set in Quebec in the early eighties, after a wave of secularization made divorce more common, the film follows a man named Denis as he works up the courage to join his ex-wife and children on Christmas Eve. What follows is not a picture-perfect holiday but a snapshot of the small ways in which relatives can adapt for one another.
“Mama”
In Pablo de la Chica’s short documentary, a woman who has survived sexual violence heals from her trauma while working with chimpanzees in a wildlife sanctuary. Through deeply personal interviews, the film shows how the long-term conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has created intertwined crises. It is an emotionally complex story: even as the protagonist, Mama Zawadi, recounts horrors, she also nurtures the animals around her; her tale of survival is punctuated by moments of bliss.
“Step Into the River” (short-listed for Animated Short Film)
In Weijia Ma’s animated short about two young girls in a rural village in China, the river is a central metaphor. Both girls have experienced trauma, but their friendship, like Ma’s pastel animations of village life, is sweet. The director likens contemporary China to a river: “In some ways, there are values and cultures that are constant, but at the same time the environment we live in is changing faster than we can catch up.”
At fifteen years old, Meryland Gonzalez is one of the highest-ranked boxers in her division. Such an achievement would have seemed unimaginable when, as a young child, she was stricken with a mysterious illness that her doctors couldn’t diagnose. Recovery took years—she even had to learn to walk again. But in Gabriel Gaurano’s documentary, Gonzalez, who wants to compete at the Olympics and teach boxing in the Watts neighborhood of L.A., where she grew up, is laser-focussed on the future.
“Under the Heavens” (short-listed for Live Action Short Film)
In Gustavo Milan’s live-action drama, a woman named Marta, who is leaving Venezuela, connects with other migrants on their long journey. She soon finds herself entangled in a relationship that’s both complicated and threatening. Milan addresses the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and, on a smaller scale, the conflicts that arise even among those who might be allies.
Rachel Riederer is a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff. Read more.
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