Shorts Stack: Netflix’s Three Doc Short Contenders

In the last four years, Netflix has nabbed an impressive six Oscar nominations for Documentary Short Subject and winning two (for The White Helmets and Period. End of Sentence., respectively). This year, the streaming service has three viable contenders in the race that all deal with completely different subjects. One of Netflix’s strengths is the variety of documentaries (both feature and short) that they offer on their platform.

All three of their contenders share a quality of memory or looking back. A Love Song for Latasha doesn’t want to repeat history while John Was Trying to Contact Aliens shades its characterization of its lead by his experiences of of feeling different. A love of movies is at the heart of What Would Sophia Loren Do?

A Love Song for Latasha blew me away with its urgent heart and how director Sophia Nahli Allison made us consider time. In 1991, Latasha Harlins was shot in a convenience store when she stepped in to buy a bottle of orange juice for her grandmother. She was only 15 years old when the store owner killed her. Allison’s film reminds us that her death was one of the catalysts for the LA Riots but she does not focus on the details of Latasha’s death.

There are a lot of details given to us by Shinese (Latasha’s cousin) and Ty (her best friend), but they talk about Latasha’s life as a young woman–her hopes and aspirations of becoming a lawyer and her sadness of losing her mother at such a young age–instead of focusing on the tragedy. Even though her death is very much felt, Allison’s film is bright and warm with memory and love.

Allison reverses a lot of images throughout the film, a simple but effective way of making us wish we could turn back the hands of time. Even if it’s small like a tear sliding back up someone’s face or a school bus going backwards down the street, it’s a gentle way of trying to turn back the clock. A lot of young, beautiful, Black girls look directly into the lens and we connect with them. We see them. A Love Song for Latasha is a beautiful memory documentary, and Los Angeles’ streets are honestly shot without artifice. It taps into those parts of our subconsciousness that we forget are nestled in our minds.

I would, like many others, watch Sophia Loren do anything. Read a book, do the dishes, walk down the street–anything. No activity is too insignificant. Ross Kauffman’s What Would Sophia Loren Do? lovingly captures that elusive feeling of how movies and images soothe your soul and your heart.

Everyone has films that we turn to when we want to feel something, and for Nancy Kulik, that was Sophia Loren movies. Kulik is a grandmother, but she’s really a film buff–she can name any Loren title off the top of her head. She felt an immediate connection to Loren because of her own Italian-American heritage and because the screen legend didn’t look like other beauties like Grace Kelly.

Kulik talks about a lot of her own life experiences–being married to her husband for over 50 years, raising her children–but she always felt represented by Loren. She could identify with the toughness of her characters. Kulk knows every Loren gesture has a meaning and is built into her character. I loved watching her watching Loren, and the section where she watches portions of Loren’s Oscar-winning turn in Two Women is a highlight of the film.

Kauffman’s film is a real crowd-pleaser. He captures two moments that I loved. At the beginning, Loren is doing an interview and someone off-camera suggests that Loren button up her blouse and she replies, “Too much cleavage?” with a roll of her eyes. Later we see Loren’s son, Edoardo Ponti, directing his mother in Netflix’s Best Actress hopeful, The Life Ahead, and he tells his mother that she’s beautiful. She almost blushes. Those are the moments that feel truly like a movie star has stepped out of the screen and we can see her for who she really is.

With the fields of science constantly under attack, Matthew Killip’s John Was Trying to Contact Aliens is refreshing in how it shows how one man is driven by his unadulterated passion.

John Shepherd was always interested in making a connection with something alien to the point where he collected enough machinery to build equipment to send signals into outer space in the 1970’s. He insisted that the universal language was music, so he pumped jazz, reggae, electronic and Afropop sounds into the airwaves hoping he would receive a message or sign in return. Shepherd is a calm, quiet presence on screen as he narrates the events of his own life. We see polaroids of a younger Shepherd, and we can instantly find his face in the tangles of beard and long hair.

Killip doesn’t sensationalize Shepherd’s story and Aliens makes us lean in and listen. It has a campfire story quality that is inviting and curious. I could watch an entire feature film about Shepherd’s dedication, and it’s thrilling when the doc takes a gentle curve to a more personal angle of his life. There is something very alluring and sweet by the matter of fact way Killip draws us in. John Was Trying to Contact Aliens reminds us that we are tiny molecules as we look up at the stars. That’s not a criticism. It makes us value the smaller connections we develop as we are here on earth.

All of Netflix’s doc short contenders are streaming on Netflix.