Oscar-nominated shorts cover lots of stylistic and emotional ground.

If there’s one theme snaking through the dark heart of the five Oscar-nominated short docs, it’s love.

It’s unclear if director Marshall Curry intended the title of A Night at the Garden to evoke some lost Marx Brothers comedy, but intentional or not, the titular irony is rich. Sans narration except for an expository endnote, the Garden in question is Madison Square: 80 years ago this month, some 20,000 Americans filled the hall to capacity in an unprecedented political rally in favor of Adolf Hitler. Replete with Nazi banners, iconography, and torch-bearers presaging recent events in Charlottesville, the film documents the German American Bund’s mini-Triumph of the Will, and draws dismaying, surreal parallels to America’s current anti-immigrant xenophobia.

Another shade of hatred of The Other, Ed Perkins and Jonathan Chinn’s Black Sheep tells the story of Nigerian-born Cornelius Walker. Speaking directly to the camera, Walker recounts how in 2000 his mother moved the family to Essex, England, in the wake of a race-related murder near their home in London. Desperate to avoid potentially lethal confrontations with the patently racist neighborhood hooligans, Walker goes to extremes to not stand out. He adopts the local style and patois, wears blue contact lenses, bleaches his skin, and ultimately participates in violent beatdowns to avoid being targeted himself.

“I wanted to feel love,” he explains. “So I made friends with monsters.”

A judgment-free love of life until the final breath is at the empathetic core of End Game. Co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman train their senses on San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project, a mind, body, and spirit palliative care group of doctors, therapists and social workers striving to ease their patients’ path into the land beyond beyond. It may sound grim, but End Game is by far the most emotionally and intellectually human story in the quintet.

The final two short docs follow humans at their most resourceful against the worst of odds. Skye Fitzgerald and Bryn Mooser’s Lifeboat is a haunting portrait of German NGO Sea-Watch as its members put their own lives on the line to rescue imperiled refugees fleeing Libya via the unforgiving, often deadly, Mediterranean Sea. It’s humanity at its most heroic, with harrowing sequences of homeless, tempest-tossed, huddled masses yearning not for Ellis Island but for the marginally less teeming shores of the EU.

Period. End of Sentence. by Rayka Zehtabchi and Melissa Berton chronicles the women of Hapur, Delhi, in their quest to gain respect, secure a modest financial footing and break down rural India’s cultural and religious opprobrium against menstruation by manufacturing and distributing sanitary pads on their own. Dispelling stigmatization through their newfound trade, the women empower themselves while enlightening their husbands and brothers.

“Usually brothers bring gifts to their sisters,” says one participant. “But today I bought my brother a suit. I got him clothes because now I have money.”

The five films nominated for Best Animated Short are all fine examples of animation’s potential for unlocking experiences ill-served by linear and naturalistic storytelling.

The compilation eases us into its ulterior state of mind with a laugh. Animal Behaviour, directed by David Fine and Alison Snowden, is the funniest film of the lot. Within the setting of a group-therapy session, a leech with boundary issues, a praying mantis who has trouble finding a partner because of that sexual cannibalism thing (and her 1,000 babies), and an assortment of other socially maladjusted critters air their anxieties.

Bao, directed by Domee Shi and produced by Pixar, is a somber fable about a Chinese-Canadian woman whose bao dumpling turns into a live boy, who all-too soon grows up and leaves.

A standout is Late Afternoon, written and directed by Louise Bagnell. Veteran actress Fionnula Flanagan voices the main character, Emily, whose age-related dementia causes her to occasionally drift back in time. The transitions are delicate and lovely, and with repetition, bring her back comfortingly to the present.

Transitions are also what make the other two films in the program memorable. Both are adult reflections on childhood terrors. Andrew Chesworth and Bobby Pontillas’ One Small Step presents a Chinese-American girl whose maturation can be tracked by her treatment of her footwear. Only when her attentive but underappreciated papa is gone does she learn proper shoe care and how to fulfill her dream of becoming an astronaut. Trevor Jimenez’s Weekends tells the story of a boy who shuffles between the homes of his newly divorced parents. The film is nightmarish, surreal and normal, in equal measures.

OSCAR-NOMINATED SHORTS • Not Rated • 143 min. documentary • 76 min. animated • At Osio Theater