The Oscar nominees for Documentary Shorts are usually very difficult to watch. I mean, they're uniformly excellent, but the films are always extremely topical and unflinchingly brutal in their dedication to truth. At Tin Pan Theater over the last six or seven years, I've been lucky enough to watch most of the Oscar Shorts (including the Animation and Live Action ones), but I'm not sure any single short film affected me the way Skye Fitzgerald and Michael Scheuerman's "Hunger Ward" did. "Hunger Ward" focuses on the famine in Yemen, ongoing since 2016 and beginning during the Yemini Civil War. As of 2018, more than 85,000 children have died with UNICEF calling the famine "the largest humanitarian crisis in the world." The film follows health care workers Dr. Aida Alsadeeq and Nurse Mekkia Mahdi across two hospitals as they struggle to combat child malnutrition. It's filled with stories and imagery that will stay with me for the rest of my life.