DOCUMENTARY OSCAR: A TOUGH CALL : DOCUMENTARIES MAKE OSCAR DECISION A TOUGH ONE

When it comes to voting for the best feature-length documentary of 1985, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will have to summon the wisdom of Solomon--and this observation is made on the basis of just three of the five nominated films.

They are Steven Okazaki’s powerful “Unfinished Business,” the most comprehensive film yet on the complex issue of the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II; Ken Burns’ “The Statue of Liberty,” and Susan Munoz and Lourdes Portillo’s “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo.”

The second two screen at the Monica 4-Plex Saturdays and Sundays at 11:15 a.m. through March 16, starting today. (Okazaki’s film had several public screenings last year and deserves many more.)

“Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo” is a heartbreaking but inspiring real-life account of the women who provide the background for “The Official Story,” itself an Oscar contender in the foreign-language film category. They are the mothers and grandmothers who risked everything, day after day, to demonstrate against the disappearance of their offspring. Their children were among the 30,000 people who vanished during the repressive regime of the military junta that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983.

Important truths emerge in what these middle-aged, mainly middle-class women have to say about the tragic losses they have suffered. First, their children were well educated and concerned about bettering the society in which they lived; clearly, they were among the best and the brightest of their generation. From their fates we are reminded how easy and deadly dangerous it is to be branded a subversive or a communist simply by working for social change, how the evils of Nazi Germany could and did happen again--and how the religious establishment stood by and did little or nothing.

To see “Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo” enriches the meaning of “The Statue of Liberty,” which illuminates and defines what the 100-year-old lady with the torch symbolizes about America, without any flag-waving but with much verve and even more sentiment.

Burns unravels the statue’s fascinating history--how the idea was born in 1865 over brandy and cigars at the suburban Paris home of Edouard de Laboulaye, chairman of France’s Anti-Slavery Society; how sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi based his design on a statue he had hoped would grace the entrance to the Suez Canal; how the statue was financed and constructed (with a last-minute assist from A.G. Eiffel, whose tower would so soon dominate the Paris skyline).

Burns crams all this information amid irresistible archival material and the comments of important figures in arts and letters, many of them emigres, whom he has asked to define liberty and what the statue means to them.

The person who is most thoughtful, most tortured in his reply is James Baldwin, who finally concludes that “for black inhabitants of this country, the Statue of Liberty is simply a very bitter joke meaning nothing to us.”

With “Las Madres” in Theater II is David Goodman and Deborah Shaffer’s “Witness to War: An American in El Salvador,” a thoughtful 29-minute Oscar-nominated short on Dr. Charlie Clements, tops in his class at the Air Force Academy and now a physician in the Salvadoran guerrilla zone.

Playing with “The Statue of Liberty” in Theater III is another nominated short, Larry Weinstein’s 30-minute “Making Overtures,” a perfectly innocuous account of a community orchestra in a Norman Rockwell-like town in Ontario, Canada.