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Refused for a reason

Rating: NN


Shine it On! 2005: The National Salon des Refuses Rating: NN

Here’s your chance to see TIFF from the programmer’s point of view. It’s a collection of short films, selected by lottery, that didn’t quite make it into the festival.

This year the most striking fact about the program is that the majority of films – aside from Lina Rodriguez’s horrible-relationship mini-drama, Passive Voice – come from Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Regina or Winnipeg.

Clearly, there’s a burgeoning nest of larval filmmakers in the west. Salome’s Gift, by Jaymez, is an obscure narrative about guns, loud noises and the colour red Bevan Klassen’s On A Sunday is an attractively sepia, unattractively rambling and unfocused tale of a black-sheep father and son.

Dreams Of Mourning by Warren Nightingale and Dragoon Street by David Zellis both tinker with digital effects. The former renders a film about a man, a forest and a train in painterly blobs, while the latter turns people into Atari-style video game characters and back again a few too many times.

The fact that none of these films is a masterpiece is beside the point the city of cheap rent and giant mosquitoes seems poised to inundate the world with a swarm of directors.

You’ve been warned. (September 6, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art)

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