Oscar Short Documentaries: Nominations Spotlight Story Of Deaf Young People, Basketball Star Who Just Passed Away

deadline.com:

Netflix didn’t earn any Oscar nominations in the Best Documentary Feature category today, but it made up for that with documentary shorts.The streaming platform claimed three of the five nominations for Best Documentary Short Subject, between Audible, Lead Me Home, and Three Songs for Benazir.Audible, directed by Matt Ogens and executive produced by Nyle DiMarco, tells a coming-of-age story of Amaree McKenstry, a high school senior at the Maryland School for the Deaf in Frederick.“It took about 12 years to get this film made — which means to get it to a group of people that understood it and were willing to support it and make it, and that was ultimately Netflix,” Ogens told Deadline today. “I believed in the film so long and these kids at Maryland School for the Deaf that just through thick and thin, rain or shine, I just kept pursuing it for a dozen years.”The film follows McKenstry as he competes on the high school football squad; two of the other main characters in the documentary are MSD cheerleaders—McKenstry’s girlfriend Lera Walkup, and Jalen Perry.“We tried to really make it an immersive film, an audio-visual experience,” Ogens said. “I spent a lot of time with Amaree and his friends, learning from them about how they see the world, rather than it being an observational film from my point of view.

I really wanted to be a conduit to help them tell their story.”Lead Me Home, directed by Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk, explores homelessness through the lens of people in several West Coast cities, including Los Angeles.

Three Songs for Benazir, directed by Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan Mirzaei, focuses on a young couple trying to build a life together in Kabul, Afghanistan despite extremely difficult circumstances.For the