Politics at the Oscars: Documentaries nominated for Academy Awards

From the film "The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)"

The Academy Awards often draw attention to a cause or a plight or a social concern, particularly in the categories for documentary films, a genre still enjoying an extended revival. Even being among the nominees for the Oscar (as announced today) can be enough to help films put a spotlight on political or social topics. Here are the nominated documentary films and the issues they bring to the public eye.

The legacy of war in Southeast Asia plays out in two nominated documentaries. “The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)” follows a Laotian family from fighting for the CIA during the Vietnam War to fighting for a foothold in New York after emigrating to the United States. A documentary short, ”The Conscience of Nhem En,” looks back three decades with three Cambodians: two who survived a Khmer Rouge camp and another who, as a teenage soldier, photographed citizens en route to execution. (“Gran Torino,” a locally-penned feature film about Hmong immigrants in the United States and their Korean War-veteran neighbor, didn’t get nominated in any major category.)

The documentary feature “Trouble the Water” is built around 15 minutes of home video shot during Hurricane Katrina by New Orleans resident Kimberly Rivers Roberts. Another feature-length documentary, “The Garden,” follows two teenage boys, a Palestinian and an Arab Israeli, living on the streets of Tel Aviv. is about a 14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles, one of the largest in the country, that was started in the aftermath of the 1992 riots only to recently fall under threat of development.  

The short-subject documentary category also includes the Google-backed production, “The Final Inch,” about the worldwide effort to eradicate polio; “Smile Pinki,” about the struggles for surgery of two children in India with cleft lips; and ”The Witness — From the Balcony of Room 306,” about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as witnessed by Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles.

The Minnesota Independent interviewed “Trouble the Water” producer Danny Glover and director Carl Deal last September. Listen to those interviews here.

This is the trailer for “Trouble the Water.”