Road to the Oscars 2023. This documentary is nominated for 1 award and it´s best documentary short. Haulout is weird to rank and talk about. It´s more of a surreal experience than a documentary and it feels more like a film filmed for fiction than fact. It´s a very visually stringing doc though and instead of saying a lot of things it instead just wants you to see them.
In a remote hut, a man sits and waits for an event that only happens once a year. He records the event and later must conclude that things are changing here on earth.
This is a really visually striking documentary. It´s not really filmed in a traditionally documentary way and it creates these beautiful and surreal images. This is both a good and bad thing. At times it can feel like you're not really watching a documentary but more of a surreal horror movie or something like that. I liked the style, but I don´t know if I liked it for the documentary genre. But some of the images captured are beautiful and most have been a trip to experience.
As mentioned, the style and tone are less documentary and more surreal absurd comedy and horror. It´s interesting to have a doc in this style but it really clashes with my film mind. It´s telling me what I´m looking at is not real and that should not be the case when it´s supposed to show reality. There are so many cute and fun scenes, but also weird and dragged out that makes it seem a bit scary in tone at times. '
When the moment comes, and the doc really starts it hits you. It has this abrupt beginning of the event, and it just wants to show you what´s going on. No comments or text, just images.
There is a lot of wasted time here. We see a lot of the biologist just sitting, doing nothing, and it can feel like the doc, once again is taking it´s beautiful imagery and making a movie more than a documentary. If this had been longer than it was, I would have liked it far less. It´s only because of it´s short runtime it can get away with what it did.
This doc is a different way to talk about issues. Normally when you make a doc of this nature, you wud have foreboding music, giant graphs of danger. Voiceover and text that really tells you "Danger here is a problem" but this doc is honest and just says "here, look at this". It´s a more honest approach but I would say not as impactful.
I place this documentary in the middle of the rating spectrum. I might rank it higher or lower in the future but I´m very torn about it. I liked it´s approach and style but hated it was a doc. It really undermines what it wants to say by being too filmic and it can feel like nothing is really said.
Oscar predictions: I could see this go and win. It´s a political statement from the academy and the more filmic approached might speak to some voters. Now the creator is Russian so that might affect the voting with a most likely, anti-Russian discourse at this years event, but I have no idea if it will affect anything. So far, I would rather have the Elephant Whisperers winning, but I see them as on par. I hope a better short documentary will blow me more away than the 2 I have seen so far.
