When it comes to storytelling, most filmmakers prefer to let the material speak for itself. That was the case for the six Oscar-nominated short documentary directors who met with TheWrap Executive Awards Editor Steve Pond as part of TheWrap’s 2022-2023 Awards Season Screening Series: Kartiki Gonsalves ( “The Elephant Whisperers”), Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev (“Haulout”), Anne Alvergue (“The Martha Mitchell Effect”), Jay Rosenblatt (“How do you measure a year?”) and Joshua Seftel (“A stranger in the door”).
For Gonsalves, whose film centers on a small-town South Indian couple who rescue an orphaned elephant, less was more. “I just wanted ‘The Elephant Whisperers’ to allow viewers to understand both the elephant and the human caretakers with very little, almost minimal outside interpretation,” he said. “I was really trying to focus on the dignity of both the elephants and the indigenous people who have literally lived with them and cared for them for centuries. I wanted the audience to stop seeing animals as each other and start seeing them as one of us.”
“Haulout” also takes on the natural world: it explores the tragedy of seals stranded ashore in the Siberian Arctic due to climate change. “Our movie has super minimal dialogue,” Arbugaev said. “We really wanted, first of all, to give space to the natural elements – the landscape, the wind and the tundra – and we felt that this wordless space is needed to set the atmosphere and make the viewer feel the place. And also, because when we first came across the story, we had such a strong reaction and we were on such an emotional journey that we wanted to keep that for the viewer as well.”
For several of the filmmakers, it was also important to restore a human element to the stories, such as the protagonist of “The Martha Mitchell Effect,” the Watergate whistleblower who was nearly destroyed by Richard Nixon’s cronies. Using archival footage of Mitchell, who was the wife of Nixon’s attorney general, Alvergue gave her a voice that had been drowned out by history for years.
“This is not just a summary of what happened to Martha, this hidden figure who played a bigger role in Watergate,” he said. “It’s also a love triangle. It’s the dissolution of a marriage, but it’s also a love triangle in the sense that Martha and Nixon were fighting to compete for John Mitchell’s attention. And in the end, it’s a tragedy. John Michell chooses his boss over his wife. So it really is the human side of the scandal.”
Seftel also focused on the power of human emotion in his chronicle of a US soldier with PTSD who returns from Afghanistan and plans to blow up a local mosque. “In some ways, the movie is like a case study of a hate crime, but a hate crime that never happened,” she said. “And we don’t hear those stories often enough. In a way, it’s a model of how to have a positive outcome.”
“This woman, Bibi Bahrami, the main character in our film, when she finds out that people hate her for what she believes, for her religion, for the veil that covers her head, her first reaction is that she wants to invite them to dinner and talk to her. them and really build a bridge to change their minds,” Seftel said. “And I think we are all capable of doing that. We all have that agency, to be kind to the people around us, to welcome strangers, to welcome people we don’t know or who might seem different from us.”
Each filmmaker spoke passionately about their work, but perhaps none more so than Rosenblatt when he explained the challenges he faced making “How Do You Measure a Year?” which documented the first 18 years of her daughter’s life with a video filmed annually on her birthday.
“My daughter was great at all times. But, you know, she was growing up. And there were a lot of challenges, just keeping the focus on her, especially when she was very young,” she said. “More than the challenges, it was just this very joyous and very, very loving process. She had never made a film with a subject that I liked so much ”.