True believers

Just when Mel Gibson might have thought his “Passion of the Christ” worries were behind him, Sister Rose Thering may provide an Academy Awards referendum on the filmmaker’s divisive movie about the crucifixion of Jesus.

This year’s varied slate of five nominated documentary shorts includes “Sister Rose’s Passion,” a profile of a Dominican nun’s tireless fight against anti-Semitism. The 84-year-old Thering has crusaded for five decades to shift blame for the crucifixion away from Jews toward all people, and her targets have included everything from the Vatican to Roman Catholic schoolbooks to “The Passion of the Christ,” whose director’s grasp of the Gospels Thering labels “shocking.”

“It’s not like we’re an answer or a response to Mel Gibson’s film,” says Oren Jacoby, who produced and directed the documentary short. “But the whole controversy exploded while I was interviewing Sister Rose.” Gibson declined to comment.

In a way, “Sister Rose’s Passion” stands as a perfect illustration of the work coming from these Oscar-nominated filmmakers. These movies struggle to attract financing, are rarely seen outside of a few theaters and remain the Oscars’ unwelcome stepchildren. But they often deliver more provocative stories than many nominated dramatic features, even as they explore widely different topics. And they accomplish all that in 40 minutes or less, the running time separating documentary shorts from documentary features.

“Shorts are much more difficult to make than [documentary] features,” says Arthur Dong, an academy governor and documentary filmmaker. “Every frame has to count.”Two of the five films nominated this year, “Hardwood” and “Autism Is a World,” are personal tales of otherwise private people. Two more, “Sister Rose’s Passion” and “The Children of Leningradsky,” come from impassioned advocates. One film, “Mighty Times: The Children’s March,” is a wide-ranging historical narrative. And all are considered the best short nonfiction films around.

“The Oscars still stand as the highest quality check in the industry,” says Bobby Houston, who co-produced and co-directed “The Children’s March.”

And yet within the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the documentary shorts have had to hold on by their fingernails. “It’s an ongoing battle,” says Gerardine Wurzburg, the producer and director of “Autism Is a World.”

In 1987, the academy considered banishing the documentary shorts and three other awards into its non-televised technical achievement ceremony. Five years ago, the academy tried to combine documentary features and shorts into a single category. This year the documentary short is among the lesser Oscar categories suffering the potential ignominy of two new ways of awarding statuettes.

The makers of these nonfiction films all will either be asked to stand on the Kodak Theatre stage where the one winner -- and, obviously, the four losers -- will be revealed (called “the firing line” variation by one documentarian), or all filmmakers, including the winner, will be told to remain in their seats as the statuette is handed over (dubbed the “Let’s Make a Deal” twist by the same filmmaker).

For the first time, the academy has organized a pre-ceremony public screening of the nominated live-action and animated short films. It bestowed no such support on the documentary shorts. Too see them locally, you must attend the International Documentary Assn.’s DocuDay on Feb. 26 in Beverly Hills (information: www.documentary.org).

No matter how difficult their filmmaking task -- to repair her camera, the director of “The Children of Leningradsky” had to borrow money from her mother -- the documentary directors press on, convinced the documentary short remains a compelling vehicle to bring attention to otherwise overlooked stories.

Hanna Polak, co-director of “The Children of Leningradsky,” first met the scores of homeless children living near a Moscow train station more than five years ago. After Polak gained the children’s trust through providing food, clothes and medical care, she began taking still photographs of her 70 young subjects. She started filming them in 2001, recording for two years how these children struggle, play, and die.

“I wasn’t even thinking about showing the movie on television or anything,” Polak says from her native Poland. “I was just trying to get help for the children.”

The Oscar nomination has certainly benefited her cause.

“I’m very happy, mostly because many more people now want to see the movie,” says Polak, who once housed a dozen of the children for Christmas. “I am getting letters from people about how they can help the children.”

The young people in “Children’s March” suffer not from neglect but from racism, yet they courageously join forces to stand up to their oppressors. In the film, co-directors Houston and Robert Hudson examine a turning point in the civil rights movement, when in 1963 thousands of young blacks marched in defiance of Bull Connor, Birmingham’s segregationist commissioner of public safety.

“Children’s March” employs the most complex narrative and filmmaking techniques of any of the five nominated films, from period music to massive reenactments. “Our films are definitely on steroids,” Houston says. “We are making a rock ‘n’ roll spectacle.”

In the tradition of documentary filmmakers, Houston and Hudson parlayed the success of their 2002 Oscar-nominated “Mighty Times: The Legacy of Rosa Parks” to open the doors needed to make “Children’s March.”

“ ‘Rosa Parks,’ ” Hudson says, “was attacked as a nearly impossible movie to make: ‘What more can you tell?’ And now it’s a very popular short that is still broadcast on HBO.”

While that pay cable channel is one of the country’s best supporters of documentary film, another cable outlet, CNN, is behind “Autism Is a World.” At the center of the film stands the diminutive Sue Rubin, who as a toddler was diagnosed as autistic and believed to be mentally retarded until she was 13. With a computer keypad, Rubin finally was able to express a sharp intellect that had remained hidden for years. (Rubin’s dialogue is narrated by actress Julianna Margulies.)

“Sue is the Helen Keller of her generation,” says director Wurzburg, who won the documentary short Oscar for 1992’s “Educating Peter.” “A strong documentary is about a strong story, and she is a strong story.”

As she grapples with her autistic behavior (which includes an obsession with spoons and water), Rubin studies history at Whittier College and writes speeches about living with autism. “It very much is a civil rights issue,” Wurzburg says, “when someone can be lost when they have that kind of potential.”

“Hardwood” is perhaps the most personal movie of the five, as Canadian filmmaker Hubert Davis revisits his past to understand better his family.

Like many other documentary shorts, “Hardwood” was financed by an amalgam of funders, proving the maxim that most documentary filmmakers spend 99% of their time raising money and the remaining 1% actually making movies.

“I just thought realistically I would get maybe $15,000,” Davis says from Toronto. “I would have thought that was a lot, and I could have made it for $5,000.” He eventually raised $74,000, but that merely highlighted another problem: Who, now, would actually go see his film?

The Oscar nomination unquestionably helped. “My brother’s friends used to dismiss it: ‘It’s just something your brother did,’ ” Davis says. “Now they’re calling, asking, ‘How can I get copies?’ It’s been amazing to hear that.”

As skeptical as Davis was about “Hardwood’s” audience interest, “Sister Rose” director Jacoby was equally dubious about whether an elderly nun merited a movie. “I wasn’t sure what the drama of her story was,” the filmmaker says. “But I had to tell her story, because she’s such a great character.”

Even though many documentarians dream of making bigger-budgeted feature films, as several past winners in the category have gone on to do, the focus for this year’s five nominees remains their subjects.

“More than anything,” Jacoby says of his film’s brief visit into the Oscar spotlight, “I hope it calls attention to Sister Rose and her work and what has been for her a lonely battle.”