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Some of the nominees for the ‘documentary (short subject) award in California this month, including Adam Benzine (third left) and Ben Cleary (second right).
Some of the nominees for the ‘documentary (short subject) award in California this month, including Adam Benzine (third left) and Ben Cleary (second right). Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images
Some of the nominees for the ‘documentary (short subject) award in California this month, including Adam Benzine (third left) and Ben Cleary (second right). Photograph: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

Oscars 2016: the nominees hoping to take the short path to success

This article is more than 8 years old

With four nominees having strong British links and the funding situation at home growing desolate, this year’s short film gongs could provide a vital springboard. What can the current hopefuls learn from last year’s winners?

“I’m going to ask J-Law out,” says Adam Benzine. “She’s always saying no one does.” When you hear about the opportunities afforded by an Oscar nomination for a short film, they don’t tend to mention this sort of thing. But Benzine, the director of the 40-minute-long Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah – an insightful, considered interview of the great French documentary maker – is about to head off to the Oscar nominees’ luncheon where everyone, from the sound mixers to the costume designers to the big-shot actors and producers, will rub shoulders and huddle together for the big team photo.

In the event, Benzine didn’t get the chance to work his magic on Jennifer Lawrence. But he did meet Steven Spielberg and had a chat about the latter’s work with the USC Shoah Foundation, of which Spielberg is the founder and where Benzine did his research, looking for material among the copious out-takes of Lanzmann’s mammoth 1985 masterwork, Shoah. Benzine’s film, which tells the story of the making of Shoah as well as providing an overview of Lanzmann’s life and career, is up for best documentary short, and provides a salutary lesson in how a British film-maker with no previous experience can make it to the big event.

Benzine – who is a journalist based in Toronto, chief of the Canadian division of international digital publisher C21Media – says his own experience of reporting on documentary-making encouraged him to get on with his own film: “The days of the BBC giving money to a first-time film-maker are long gone, and losing True Stories on Channel 4 was a big blow to the entire British documentary industry; there’s nowhere else to go, really.” He put his own money into the film, hired a crew and flew them out to Paris to interview Lanzmann. Towards the end of the editing process, he got investment from European TV networks ZDF and Arte, and HBO bought Spectres of the Shoah as a finished film. No British welcome has yet materialised: Benzine says he remains disappointed that “a self-financed, British, Oscar-nominated documentary can’t find a home on British TV”.

Describing the production process as “pain and suffering for a long time”, Benzine is delighted at his film’s success, but still has no firm plans to go into film-making full-time. “I’m a journalist who made a film,” he insists. Perhaps understandably, his counterparts in the fiction sector are more focused on hacking their way through the Hollywood undergrowth. There’s quite a bit of British interest in the live action shorts nominees, which include Shok, a harrowing Kosovo-set thriller directed by Leeds-born Jamie Donoughue; a heartrending little London romance called Stutterer, directed by Ben Cleary (born in Dublin); and Ave Maria, a West Bank-set drama directed by the Nazareth-born and Scottish-trained film-maker Basil Khalil.

Donoughue, who was stranded in Kosovo for three weeks during the Icelandic volcano eruptions in 2010, says he fell in love with the country’s “hospitable” people. He spent four years researching its turbulent recent history before writing Shok (Albanian for “friend”), an impressively ambitious film about two young boys caught in the Kosovo war of the 1990s. With a background in music videos, Donoughue said he responded to Kosovans’ “desperation to have their story heard” and he sounds like he’s on his way as a director; even before the nomination, he already had an agent and has “quite a few things coming up already”. The Oscar attention has allowed him to solidify a deal for a US TV drama, as well as develop a feature-length work also set in Kosovo.

Ben Cleary’s Stutterer is a smaller scale piece, using its protagonist’s speech impediment as the central hook for amplifying the travails of online romance. The writer-director says he originally conceived of it as a screenwriting showcase (“It’s a lot harder to get in the room as a director if you’ve nothing on your reel”) but decided eventually to direct it himself. Stutterer got on to the Oscar list after winning an award at a qualifying festival, LA Shorts fest; Shok did the same, winning best drama at Aspen Shortsfest. The 140 or so qualifiers are winnowed down to a longlist of 10, then further reduced to the five-strong nomination list. (The final nominees find out live, along with everyone else. The reaction videos are something to see.)

If any of them are lucky enough to win, a measure of the significance can be derived from the experience of another pair of British film-makers, Mat Kirkby and James Lucas, who took home last year’s Oscar for best live action short for The Phone Call, which featured Sally Hawkins as a suicide-prevention helpline volunteer.

Kirkby and Lucas had certain advantages. Both worked for Ridley Scott: Kirkby was – and still is – on his production company’s books as a commercials director, while Lucas was his rep. A year on from their moment of glory, the pair are, amicably, going their separate ways. Kirkby, who says he paid for The Phone Call by selling his car, spent the 30-day nomination window securing a major Hollywood agent and pitching his ideas to a series of big-shot producers (“It’s a bit like speed-dating, but I wouldn’t have got in there if I wasn’t nominated for an Oscar”); his biggest idea, the “motherlode” as he describes it, is a film about the human genome project – it was picked up by one of the big-shots and he is currently writing a script for it. “Those meetings were like a film school for me,” he says.

Lucas, on the other hand, who unlike Kirkby had a permanent job at Scott’s company, sees himself more as a writer, and opted to leave and set up his own company. “It was always the goal,” he says. The decision is working out well so far: he has signed deals and got commissions but stresses he has to remain “super focused”. Projects include a TV series about Paul Gascoigne, a crime series called Chameleon (he’s currently working a pilot), and a script about a mentally ill woman in 1960s Britain.

So what can they tell the current batch of nominees? Lucas sums it up: “I’ve always been into film, so to reach that pinnacle was my wildest dreams came true. Without doubt it’s been a life-changing experience.”

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