Of the fifteen short film nominees at the Oscars each year (five each across animated, live action, and documentary), there’s typically one you look at and think “holy god, what on earth happened here for this to have been nominated”. Happily, I have found this year’s anomaly early. It is Stranger At The Gate, a misguided soapbox for a US veteran to proudly and in great detail explain how he moved to a town with a reasonable but not overwhelming Muslim population and was so incensed by their general presence that he was going to blow up a mosque. Only to be persuaded out of it by… talking to them and… finding out that they were normal, friendly people? And now he’s converted. You suppose on some level that this should be applauded, or at least the documentary filmmakers seem to think, but my god if this is where we’re setting the bar, we need to improve this world’s collective self-esteem. I don’t think this is the good look that either the filmmakers or the subject seem to think it is. It’s a distressing tale of how fundamentally lacking in empathy some people are that they cannot imagine it would be wrong to commit a terrorist attack until they are treated with politeness.