Advertisement

Movies & TV News & Features

Short Cuts Canada

SHORT CUTS CANADA

Programme 1 Sep 9, TIFF Lightbox 2, 10 pm Sep 10, Jackman Hall, 10 am. Rating: NNN

Programme 2 Sep 11, TIFF Lightbox 3, 8:45 pm Sep 12, Jackman Hall, 5 pm. ­Rating: NN

Programme 3 Sep 12, TIFF Lightbox 3, 6 pm Sep 13 TIFF Lightbox 3, 3:30 pm. ­Rating: NNNNN

Programme 4 Sep 12, Jackman Hall, 8 pm Sep 13, Jackman Hall, 5 pm. Rating: NNN

Programme 5 Sep 13, Jackman Hall, 7:30 pm Sep 14, Jackman Hall, 2:30 pm. ­Rating: NNNN

Programme 6 Sep 14, TIFF Lightbox 2, 5:30 pm Sep. 15, TIFF Lightbox 2, 1 pm. Rating: n/a


In addition to documentaries, midnight movie classics and higher-profile festival fare, local cineastes sure love short films.

From the Worldwide Short Film Festival to the Toronto Youth Shorts Festival to the One Minute Film Festival, Toronto filmgoers have proven in the past several years that shorts can be just as entertaining and commercially viable as long-form work.

Shorts often function as a proving ground for emerging talents and as a way for more established filmmakers to re-energize. Any festival worth its salt programs a shorts package, and TIFF, in Short Cuts Canada, shows our country’s best short filmmaking.

Screening 43 films in six separate programs, SCC functions almost as a festival within a festival. Naturally, the quality varies, but most programs offer a pretty solid selection of films across different genres and styles of filmmaking.

SCC gets off to a decent start in Programme 1, whose brightest highlight is the dystopian musical comedy Patch Town. In director Craig Goodwill’s alternate reality, Cabbage Patch Kids are living entities being farmed in an Orwellian republic. The musical numbers could use a little tweaking, but its sheer creativity and conviction make Patch Town one of the festival’s most thoroughly enjoyable (if bittersweet) shorts.

The opening package also includes the amusing Issues, in which a mohawked clown complains to his therapist about the pitfalls of fame, directed by Flashpoint’s Hugh Dillon (who also stars and wrote the screenplay) and Enrico Colantoni and Up In Cottage Country, which adapts Kafka’s In Der Strafkolonie into the story of an Everyman (a wonderful Josh Peace) insistent on living by a rigid set of rules who gets lost on a canoe trip and ends up in the woods with soldiers from a bygone era.

Programme 5 is better than the first, anchored by two excellent shorts and several very good ones. Spirit Of The Bluebird opens the package and stuns with its powerful story of an aboriginal grandmother’s murder told over animation being painted onto the fence and shed near the place where her body was discovered.

Two hip-hop-tinged shorts stand out in the same series. 4am is an impassioned bit of beat poetry from Muhammad Muwakil lamenting the violent nature of his hometown in Trinidad. The more fictionally inclined can look to director Cory Bowles’s Heart Of Rhyme and its tale of a heart transplant recipient (Gary Levert) who finds himself drawn to the beats of daily life and prone to sudden outbursts of freestyling. Both shorts do a great job of showcasing hip-hop as a means of escape from the pains of everyday life.

Programme 2, with only one short worth seeing, is the weakest of the six. Igor Drljaca’s The Fuse: Or How I Burned Simon Bolivar looks back at the start of the 1992 Bosnian conflict via home video footage and reflective narration. Despite shelling outside and the need to flee from constant violence, all the young Drljaca cared about was his grade on an impending elementary school art assignment. Powerful first-person footage and youthful exuberance add up to a short that’s far better than the program it’s in.

Opener Tabula Rasa, an annoyingly precious and sonically off-putting look at a Manitoba flood in 1955, contains some of the fest’s most needless religious iconography. Afternoon Tea (about a young white boy visiting an older Sikh gentleman for mysterious reasons), Sorry, Rabbi (about miscommunication between a group of Hassidic men and a lax Jew who just broke up with his girlfriend), and The Pedestrian Jar (a woeful one-note joke in the style of The Office about people needing to put spare change into a jar after hitting pedestrians and cyclists with their cars) all take far too long to get to unsatisfying and unsurprising conclusions.

They’re still better than the deathly dull and overlong Solar Wind, about an uninteresting man having second thoughts about the death cult he’s joined.

If the second SCC program is lacklustre, the fourth is uneven. Animated shorts The Devil’s Due and Of Events and the live-action mouthful A Film Portrait Reconstructing 12 Possibilities That Preceded The Disappearance Of Zoe Dean Drum all aspire to a form of higher art that the filmmakers simply can’t achieve. They are visually impressive, but largely hollow and empty.

Programme 4 hits its highest notes with two heartbreaking shorts about illness. The documentary Mandeep profiles an incredibly lonely man at the mercy of his out-of-control Tourette’s, while the fictional but equally gut-wrenching La Ronde looks at a young woman’s desire to escape her home life following her schizophrenic father’s suicide attempt. Both stick with the viewer long after they’ve ended.

Fans of the Lightbox’s recent Federico Fellini retrospective and art exhibit will get a kick out of Programme 4’s Derailments, which focuses on Fellini’s best-known unfilmed work, Il viaggio di Mastorna. Told from the point of view of a graphic artist who worked alongside Fellini, it’s a compact but comprehensive history lesson about one of the greatest films never made.

The must-see of Short Cuts Canada is the stellar third package, which includes the four best shorts in the festival. Doubles With Slight Pepper (from first-time director Ian Harnarine) offers no easy answers to a young Trini man’s struggle with his absentee father’s sudden reappearance in his life. It features two excellent performances by Errol Sitahal and Sanjiv Boodhu as son and father respectively, and together with Harnarine they offer one of the best portraits of a fractured family in recent memory.

The Weight Of Emptiness and Hope are the two best films in the series. The former deals with a woman determined to hang onto her young son after an argument that leads to a complete loss of gravity in their tiny apartment the latter focuses on a soldier slowly dying in a muddy crevasse. Both films are expertly filmed and achieve a dreamlike sense of despair.

Sundays finds immense joy in what might look like just another boring day. Bouncing between kids stuck inside, a supermarket lot attendant, a priest, and teenagers reading the graffiti on the inside of a covered bridge, director Jean-Guillaume Bastien makes the mundane playful by adding an event that should bring all the stories together but that some of the characters fail even to notice. The entire cast seems to be relaxed and having fun. Never before has the art of doing nothing looked so attractive. Such a film could never be made as a feature, but Bastien pulls it off with quiet grace and elegance.

Finally, Programme 6’s opening short, the 3-D dance film ORA hadn’t been screened by press time, but the others were mostly worthwhile, especially the chilling We Ate The Children Last (director Andrew Cividino’s adaptation of Yann Martel’s short story of elective organ replacement surgery run amok, incorporating shot-on-location G20 footage) and the visually impressive Trotteur (about a young man attempting to outrun a train). It would be unfair to assign a rating to an incomplete package, but even without ORA in the lineup, the sixth series is well worth a look.

movies@nowtoronto.com

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted