"Everything will be okay" is a good summation of the themes for this year's batch of Oscar-nominated live action short films and it's an appropriate title for Germany/Austria's nominee for the respective category. The title comes from the phrase that people state to others when they're most likely rather unsure of what a situation's outcome will be, and in this particular short, it's often said by a divorced father (Simon Schwarz) to his young daughter (Julia Pointner), whom he plans to dart off with to Manila via a last minute flight. The father already hates the fact that the time with his precious baby girl is so limited that he winds up taking her shopping for a few toys before he goes to get an emergency passport and an airline ticket for a flight that winds up being delayed until the next morning. The two spend the night in a hotel where the little girl makes possibly the most courageous move of her life.
Everything Will Be Okay works, for one, because it's predicated upon a simple relationship that most of us will recognize and, if nothing else, softly admire. A father's bond with his daughter is sentimental and tender, and taking that away from any man is bound to cause some sort of friction or added pain to his already reeling heart from a failing marriage. With that, while we may not agree with the plan he has crafted for his daughter, we nonetheless understand his motivations and why he'd want to do something like this.
Vollrath creates a short that is built off of two things - a skeptical child's strong will and looming suspense and the feeling that something isn't quite right. We see a father's repeated plea to his daughter that things are simply complicated and are what they are, and she, no matter how many times he says it, isn't buying it. She wants to stay with her mother and doesn't understand why staying with her mother makes it that much harder for her father to regularly see her. It's a complicated issue and both parties are so stubborn that they can't take each others behavior much longer.
Furthermore, the way Vollrath positions this story is pretty intriguing to say the least. The camera is frequently fixated in bird's eye view angles, often knocking us down to about the height and stature of the little girl. With that, we never really get a sense of what the father is doing by way of his own words, so the overall effect is like we're in the shoes of the little girl, simply picking up what we can and going from there. While Everything Will Be Okay is a strong drama, it also has beautiful elements of a thriller and works to be the most favorable of the lot of live actions shorts we've been graced with this year, thanks to its inherently simplicity but added narrative and aesthetic complexity.
