If "Hunger Ward" wins an Oscar Sunday night at the 93rd Academy Awards, it could help the short documentary save lives.
Coproduced by 1984 Stillwater High School graduate Mike Scheuerman, and directed by Skye Fitzgerald, the 39-minute doc was shot in two pediatric malnutrition hospitals in Yemen in 2020.
Its main "characters" are health care workers and two children, Abeer, who was 6 and weighed 12 pounds during filming, and Omeima, who was 10 and weighed 24 pounds.
"All our partners have said Skye masterfully captures the spirit of each person," said Scheuerman, who has lived several places in Minnesota and raised his kids in Northfield. He now lives in Oregon with wife and Oscars date, Kelly (Schwartz) Scheuerman, also a Stillwater native.
"That's the goal, allowing their humanity to come through in a respectful fashion."
More than a year later, both girls are doing much better, Scheuerman reports, although their country is not.
"We look these kids in the eyes. We want to have Western audiences see it and feel it," said Scheuerman, whose film draws attention to the humanitarian/starvation crisis in Yemen, created by a Saudi Arabian blockade that keeps food and medicine from reaching Yemeni people. (The documentary can be viewed on Pluto or Paramount Plus.)
A longtime executive in the technology industry, Scheuerman came to filmmaking late. Other than a sojourn in the Dominican Republic — where being the same size as Robert Redford earned him a gig as the superstar's stand-in on the set of "Havana" — Scheuerman had no movie experience when he met Fitzgerald, whose short film, "Lifeboat," appeared at Oregon's Bend Film Festival in 2018.
