Festival’s shorts are like small windows onto large worlds

Short Cuts program runs creative gamut Films can be funny, scary or just weird

Short films occupy a mere few hours of viewing during the 10 days of screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival. But it only takes a few seconds to leave an indelible image in the mind of an appreciative moviegoer. Ann Marie Fleming’s 8- minute Room 710 has that kind of impact. Her crudely fashioned, animated woman with her thick Plasticine red- rimmed eyes makes an ironic statement on the lives of the self- absorbed and self- help obsessed. But the live- action domestic abuse viewed outside her hotel room takes the film into much more disturbing territory.

Festival programmers have bunched 38 shorts into five programs in Short Cuts Canada. As well, some of the 79 shorts in the festival accompany screenings of feature films. A Conversation with Basquiat, Tamra Davis’s dialogue with the late American artist Jean- Michel Basquiat, is matched with the feature documentary, Twelve Disciples of Nelson Mandela.

Well- made shorts stand up perfectly well on their own, like miniature dramas. Actor and screenwriter Greg Spottiswood casts Hugh Thompson as a typical dad out for a day in the park with his mischievous kid. But in a rapid, and plausible, descent, Noise turns into a parental horror story.

Festival shorts can be artist’s projects or short sketches unrelated to the filmmaker’s larger films. There’s a Flower in My Pedal

is a charming four- minute, mixed- media greeting to a mother. It is written in rhymed couplets and choreographed to whimsical imagery and a jazzy soundtrack. Director Andrea Dorfman also makes features, including Parsley Days and Love That Boy.

Ashort film can be a stepping- stone to bigger things. A few lucky emerging film directors have been selected for the festival’s Talent Lab sessions with established directors, producers and writers. David Hyde, director of the 15minute film Leo, spent a morning in a group with director Brian de Palma. “ He’s one of my heroes,” says Hyde, who got to thinking about the advantages of making a short film after hearing De Palma’s take on how to keep from compromising your vision in the big leagues of Hollywood movies.

“ I’d be so happy to play that game,” joked Hyde. But the truth is, he says, “ Short films are not compromised at all. The original idea is what you get.”

Leo, starring Joe Pinguy, is a dark comedy about a lonely loser: a flower deliveryman for whom falling in love is an occupational hazard.

Short films can be like postcards, even postcards from the edge, as in Keith Cole and Michel Caines’ audacious A Little Death — Cut Keith Cole.

This four- minute, self- conscious selfportrait bleeds into the visual art/ performance art category of the Wavelengths program. Here you can view the purely abstract film work of artists such as Izabella Pruska- Oldenhof’s Fugitive L( i) ght: the sort of mesmerizing work that could quell a noisy party. Some shorts in the festival have already had TV exposure. From Bravo! TV comes Bruce Alcock’s evocative At the Quinte Hotel, based on Al Purdy’s poem, and Larry Weinstein’s comic bit, The Argument ( A ‘ Burnt Toast’ Opera) starring Colin Mochrie.

Other shorts in the festival can be dialled up: Bravo! FACT’s Shorts in Motion are a series of very brief films created for cell phone broadcast. Sook- Yin Lee’s Unlocked and Don McKellar’s Phone Call from Imaginary Girlfriends: Ankara are itsy- bitsy films that qualify as substantial slices of life.

Canadian feature director Andrea Dorfman’s short, There’s a Flower in My Pedal, is utterly unlike her longer work, a four-minute lyrical mixed-media greeting to a mother, set in rhyming couplets against the backdrop of a jazz soundtrack.

Jason Murray, above, plays The Teenager in actor/ director Greg Spottiswood’s 17-minute Noise, about a child’s playful misbehaviour that goes wrong.

Comic artist Kaare Andrews’ Unwritten, a reflection on living life as a series of abortive starts, focuses on an elderly man (John Burnside, above), who is taking his 51st shot at writing the same novel when a reporter intervenes to tell his life story.