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Worldwide Short Film Festival

WORLDWIDE SHORT FILM FESTIVAL from Tuesday (June 1) to June 6. Various times and locations. shorterisbetter.com. See listings. Rating: NNNN


The Canadian Film Centre’s Worldwide Short Film Festival is a feast.

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Screening 281 short films from 34 countries, the 16th edition is a formidable gathering of cinematic talent, delivered in bite-sized bursts of creativity. And as always, if something doesn’t work for you, just sit tight another one will be along momentarily.

This year’s festival throws a spotlight on Polish cinema, with two live-action programs and one animated selection. Another program collects productions from Mexico’s Centro de Capacitatión Cinematográfica.

The WSFF imports onedotzero’s omnibus New British Talent ’09, which assembles 16 very strong shorts from the past year, including Aardman Animation’s dry comedy The Surprise Demise Of Francis Cooper’s Mother, directed by Felix Massie and narrated by Alexei Sayle, and Photograph Of Jesus, an inventive and engaging romp through the Getty Images archives.

Female filmmakers are celebrated this year in two programs. Lunafest: Short Films By, For, About Women collects shorts from around the world, while Doris offers the fruit of a Swedish collective dedicated to encouraging female actors, composers and screenwriters the result is memorable, gender-specific work like Lena Koppel’s Mon 3, a grim fairy tale about two girls lost in the woods, and Maria Eng’s Rehearsal, a brief and beautifully shot tale of empowerment.

There’s some excellent animation on view. Bruno Mangyoku and Tom Haugomat deliver a lovely animated tale of athletic determination in Jean François, playing in Official Selection 3, as does Nick Fox-Gieg’s The Orange, a short and sweet little story about an omnipotent citrus.

Rehearsal is a beautifully shot tale of empowerment.

Laughter Without Borders features a strong lineup of international comedy shorts. Sweden’s Patrik Eklund is the big winner, with Instead Of Abracadabra, the pitch-perfect tale of an inept magician, and Seeds Of The Fall, about a middle-aged couple presented with an innovative way to finance their home repairs. Also kind of brilliant are the two Drunk History shorts, celebrity re-enactments of inebriated historical misrememberings produced for funnyordie.com. (John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover as Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla? I am so there.)

The Drunk History shorts also appear in the Celebrity Shorts program, alongside Joachim Back’s The New Tenants, winner of this year’s Oscar for best live-action short, The Summer House, starring a fresh-faced Robert Pattinson, and Higglety Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More To Life, a Maurice Sendak adaptation from Madame Tutli-Putli creators Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski and narrated by Meryl Streep.

Oddly, you won’t find actor James Franco’s Herbert White there. Instead, the short – starring recent Oscar nominee Michael Shannon as a family man with a fairly predictable secret – is in Official Selection 9, along with Andreas Mendritzki’s oblique Fear Of Snakes and Katie Wolfe’s messy New Zealand abuse allegory, Redemption.

My pick for the single best short in the festival is Paul Wright’s Believe, screening in Official Selection 2. The study of a man being crushed by grief in the Scottish highlands, it’s so raw, furious and heartfelt that it almost hurts to watch.

It shares the bill with some interesting pieces – Catherine Bernstein’s confessional Nude, James Cunningham’s animated war story, Poppy, Fenar Ahmad’s Danish drama, Megaheavy – but you’ll have to struggle to remember them the next day. Believe simply obliterates them.

normw@nowtoronto.com

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