Winner of the Swiss Film Prize for Best Short Film, Güzin Kar's Your Street has now become an Academy Award-qualified short courtesy of its top prize, along with a $5,000 cash award, for Best Doc Short at Indy Shorts International Film Festival. 

In a mere seven minutes, Güzin Kar paints a powerful portrait of a featureless street on an industrial estate in Bonn, Germany that looks and feels almost abandoned or unfinished as the camera reveals its images. The street, we learn, bears the name of a child. 

This child is not someone I've heard of before watching this film. 

I'd dare say most people within the vicinity don't know this child or this child's story. 

However, this child's legacy lives on, if in name only, where this street commemorates the racially motivated terrorist attack that claimed this child's life along with the lives of other family members. 

Narrated poignantly by Sybille Berg, Your Street's power lies in its simplicity and refusal to dramatize an already dramatic story largely forgotten because that is, after all, largely what we do with such stories. 

We move on. 

Cinematography by Felix Von Muralt is itself almost detached with a lens bathed in grays and washed out colors and images not so much created for the film as simply waiting to reveal themselves for the film. It feels inappropriate to call the film a beautiful film, but there's beauty here that makes the story that unfolds that much more powerful. 

The Academy Award-qualifying Indy Shorts has a knack for selecting the year's finest amongst its screening films and finalists. Your Street is no exception to this rule and it will be fun to watch when awards season arrives to see just how far this quietly powerful short's journey continues. 

Written by Richard Propes
The Independent Critic