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The Oscar winner for Best Live Action Short, Aaron Schneider & Andrew J. Sacks’s "Two Soldiers," isn’t included in the Coolidge Corner’s "Academy Award Nominated Shorts" program. But some of the runner-ups on hand are worth a look. In German director Florian Baxmeyer’s "Die rote Jacket/The Red Jacket," a despairing father tosses his dead son’s soccer jacket into the trash. It’s reclaimed and shipped off in a Red Cross package to Sarajevo, where an urchin grabs it. His family are killed, he’s medivacked off to a German hospital still wearing the jacket, and . . . Poignant, if manipulative and predictable. Also set in Sarajevo in 1994, Slovenian director Stefan Arsenijevic’s "(A) Torsion" skips the schmaltz in favor of Eastern European black comedy and absurdity in its tale of a Bosnian choir that takes a detour from its concert trip to Paris to serenade a pregnant cow during her difficult birth in the midst of an artillery barrage. Art and a couple of mad dogs save the day. As for the Oscar-winning Animated Short, Australian director Adam Elliot’s claymation "Harvie Krumpet" charms as a Polish immigrant with Tourette’s syndrome finds happiness, of sorts, adopting a Thalidomide baby and waiting with Alzheimer’s victims for a bus that never comes (plus, Elliot made Oscar history by being the first to thank his gay lover in his acceptance speech). These gems take up a lot less time than The Lord of the Rings trilogy and are, in their own way, more rewarding. In various languages with English subtitles. (86 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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