The Blood of Yingzhou District offers a devastating 39-minute look into the lives of impoverished Chinese orphans whose parents died of AIDS, leaving them outcast and, in some cases, HIV-infected. It’s OK if you’re rolling your eyes right now — if there’s one reason this short won’t win, it’s because producers Ruby Yang and Thomas Lennon so blatantly embrace every Oscar-bait ingredient imaginable: wide-eyed kids, terminal disease and harrowing third-world living conditions. But I assure you, the film is absolutely sincere. Yang and Lennon genuinely care about the five children they follows, and the superstition and ignorance they uncover are alarming. For example, it turns out the disease spread via the local blood-donation program, an easy way for poor locals to earn money. Collectors pooled all of the donated blood together, extracted the plasma and then reinjected it back into the poor donors, so they would recover quickly and be able to donate again. The subtitled movie shows empathy instead of outrage and seeks not to correct the past but educate future Chinese generations.

Recycled Life serves as another eye-opener, taking audiences into the subculture of “guajeros” that has evolved around Central America’s most enormous landfill, the Guatemala City Garbage Dump. Here, a community of thousands depends on what the city throws away, breathing the air and combing the surface of the toxic site. As the film points out (in a rather heavy dose of quasi-poetic Nature Channel-sounding narration performed by Edward James Olmos), entire generations have been raised in the dump, knowing nothing else of the world. Director Leslie Iwerks has social reform in mind, focusing on education and protection for the guajeros, but the 38-minute short loses its impact as she grows more agitated. It’s most powerful images are quiet ones, captured in co-writer Mike Glad’s still photos. In its more meditative moments, Recycled Life brings to mind both the outstanding Sundance documentary Manufacturing Landscapes (about similar conditions in China) and Agnès Varda’s transcendental cine-essay The Gleaners & I, about the broader role of collector-recyclers in both society and art.

If there’s a weak link here, it’s Rehearsing a Dream, an almost off-puttingly effusive promotional film about ARTS Week, where actors, dancers, artists and musicians come together to learn from professional mentors. For at least the first quarter of this 40-minute entry, the students offer soundbite-sized raves of how the program will change their lives; then directors Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon move didactically through each discipline to show these former outcasts, band geeks and closet cases experiencing a sense of inclusion for the first time. That’s all well and good, but the heavy-handed approach feels more like an Army recruitment video than a proper documentary (“Be all that you can be at ARTS Week!”). Why didn’t the filmmakers identify a handful of candidates before the fact, show them feeling ostracized in their hometown environments and then focus the film on how they adjust to a life-changing week of creative instruction, camaraderie and raging hormones? Instead, it’s all hyperbole all the time as the movie pounds home a point it’s hard to imagine anyone questioning: ARTS Week sure is great (even Vanessa Williams says so!). But to tell a story about these teens without acknowledging the D-R-A-M-A inherent in such a pressure-cooker event is to miss the point entirely.

The strongest nominee also happens to be the shortest. Two Hands runs a swift 18 minutes — half the length of the others and, blessedly, brisk enough to leave you wanting more. Two Hands is also the most overtly stylized of the docs, graced with elegant Errol Morris-esque touches in the way it presents the life of pianist Leon Fleisher, a virtuoso who nearly lost the use of his right hand in a freak accident. But this is no My Left Foot-like tale of inflated heroism, but a reflective character study based on a personality so interesting — and eloquent — that we hardly mind its narrowly focused intimacy. Fleisher had already “recovered” (that is, regained sufficient use of his hand to hold a much-anticipated concert) before the filmmakers even approached him, but they’ve found such a compelling subject that his words transport us where the occasionally abstract images on screen cannot. He confides, for instance, that his return concert was a compromised one: The music had to be changed at the last minute to pieces less demanding on his right hand, so while the world applauded, Fleisher himself realized that the accomplishment was incomplete. Made by My Architect team Nathaniel Kahn and Susan Rose Behr, the doc draws no glib lesson from Fleisher’s experience, but satisfies itself to have shared with us his journey, carried out on the image of the determined artist seated at his piano accompanied by the sound of his music. Of the four praise-worthy nominees, it is the one that most compelled me to put my own two hands together in applause.

[as featured on Collider.com]