Canadian shorts are long on quality
This has been the best year in recent memory for Oscarnominated short films. Many of the nominees for the Feb. 24 Academy Awards play like mini thrillers, with stories that could leave you gasping for breath.
It’s also a banner year for Canadian film brevity. Five of the total 10 nominees in the animated and live action categories for Best Short Film are by Canuck filmmakers, a record haul by a country that has always stood tall by running short. Among the many past Oscar short winners from Canada are A Place to Stand (1967), I’ll Find a Way (1977), The Sand Castle (1977), Bob’s Birthday (1994) and The Danish Poet (2006).
You can see this year’s Oscar shorts nominees on the big screen — and consider this a hearty recommendation to do just that. TIFF Bell Lightbox is showing them starting Friday (details at tiff.net), which gives you plenty of time to get a leg up on your office Oscar pool. (TIFF is also screening the Best Documentary Short Subject contenders; there are no Canadian ones this year.)
Whether or not this year’s Canadian short films take home any gold — and there’s an excellent chance they will — they amount to a CanCon gold mine by any measure.
They’re all really good, and they all coincidentally explore jeopardized relationships, either of family or friends.
For Best Animated Short Film, Disney/Pixar’s Bao is the most high-profile nominee, having played before Incredibles 2 this past summer. It’s written and directed by Toronto’s Domee Shi, a Disney/Pixar animator who is the first woman to direct a short for the ’toon titan.
It’s a fantasy story about a lonely Chinese-Canadian mother, although it’s grounded in Toronto reality — you can see the CN Tower in the background. The mom is experiencing the empty-nest blues, since her only child has left the home. She gets a second shot at motherhood when one of the dumplings she’s making for dinner springs to life, but what will happen when that dumpling grows up?
Shi, who is an only child herself, says she based her story on her family’s reactions and feelings when she left home to go work at Disney/Pixar in California.
“There are definitely things I pulled from my own life, from my mom’s experience and my dad’s experience in letting me go,” she told Anne Brodie of What She Said!, in an interview posted online.
Child/parent separation is also the theme of Weekends, an animated short by Trevor Jimenez, who based it on his stressful episodes as the child of divorced parents in the Toronto of the 1980s. The CN Tower is in this film, too, as is a garbage-scrounging raccoon, probably Toronto’s No. 2 symbol.
Weekends is the product of 10 years of planning and work, which included a one-year leave of absence for Jimenez from his job at Disney/Pixar. Like Bao, the film uses fantasy elements to impart the surreal feeling of a child torn between parental acts and expectations.
The kid’s weekends see him shuttling between extremes: his accountant mom, who tries to keep home life tranquil by playing Erik Satie’s calming Gymnopédies on the piano; and his dad, apparently an actor, whose Kabuki-themed macho pursuits are set to the rock crunch of Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing.”
The third Canadian animated short competing for an Oscar is Animal Behaviour by Vancouver's David Fine and Alison Snowden, who previously won for Bob’s Birthday in 1994. The film, which screened at TIFF last September, stuffs anthropomorphic antics into a clinical setting.
A pig, a cat, a bird, a praying mantis and a leech meet with a psychotherapist dog for a group session about social anxiety and self control ... and then an ape named Victor walks in. Sounds like a very strange joke, and it is. It’s also the first NFB animated short in 25 years for husband-andwife team of Fine and Snowden, which makes it an event apart from any Oscar glory.
In the Best Short Film Live Action category, the two Canadian competitors are both from Montreal: Marianne Farley’s Marguerite and Jérémy Comte’s Fauve.
Marguerite is a story of revealed secrets, shared between the elderly woman of the title (played by Béatrice Picard, a Quebec actress who voices Marge in the French-Canadian version of The Simpsons), and her caregiver Rachel, played by Sandrine Bisson. It’s a work of grace and delicacy that reveals much about how times have changed between then and now, especially regarding attitudes toward sexual orientation.
Fauve, which won a special jury prize at Sundance 2018, is based on a recurring nightmare that filmmaker Comte had as a child, growing up in rural Quebec. It’s set in and near one of the province’s open-pit mines, where the ground is unsteady and adult supervision is scant. The camera follows two bored and restless boys, played by Félix Grenier and Alexandre Perreault, as they boisterously explore terrain that appears benign but shifts to extreme danger.
There are also great non-Canadian contenders in the short-film categories. The other two animated nominees are Louise Bagnall’s Late Afternoon, an Irish film about an elderly dementia patient struggling to recall her youth; and the U.S./China entry One Small Step, by Andrew Chesworth and Bobby Pontillas, about a young Chinese-American girl’s dreams of becoming an astronaut.
And in the live-action category, you won’t want to miss the other three nominees, which are at once compelling and horrifying.
The Irish film Detainment, by Vincent Lacombe, uses docudrama to recreate the police interrogation of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, two Liverpool sociopaths who at the age of 10 in 1993, abducted, tortured and murdered a toddler named Jamie Bulger, in a case that shocked the world. Tried and convicted in adult court, Venables and Thompson became the youngest convicted murderers of the 20th century. It’s chilling to watch Detainment, and it’s understandable why surviving Bulger family members have objected to the film’s Oscar spotlight on a pain that never ends.
Madre, by Spain’s Rodrigo Sorogoyen, also features an imperilled child. It’s the short I most wish was feature length. A single mom receives a cellphone call from her 6-year-old son, who’s vacationing with his father in French Basque Country in what we take to be a shared-custody arrangement of a marriage gone wrong. The mom is delighted to hear from her child — until she realizes he’s been left alone on an unknown beach, with no word of the dad’s whereabouts and with night closing in and the phone battery dying.
Then there’s Skin, by Israel’s Guy Nattiv. It’s like an old Twilight Zone episode, but it’s also disturbingly resonant of modern times. Set in a corner of the U.S. Deep South where racism festers unchallenged, it tilts around an incident where an African-American father innocently smiles at a white boy in a grocery store, prompting a brutal lynching organized by the boy’s father.
The film is a like a 2019 version of the notorious Emmett Till murder of 1955 — but there’s a startling twist that will have you wondering if Rod Serling is standing just offcamera.
Incidentally, the boy who is Skin’s catalyst for racial mayhem is played by Jackson Robert Scott, who is also the title ghoul of this week’s horror opener The Prodigy and who previously co-starred in It. He’s definitely a talent to watch; so are all of these excellent Oscar shorts.
Leading Ladies at Hot Docs: Johanna Schneller, a Toronto film critic and scholar, is teaching a course at Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema titled Leading Ladies: The Great Actresses of the Modern Movies. Running Fridays through March 8, it examines such screen icons as Audrey Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Halle Berry and Jane Fonda, and reflects on past and current societal attitudes about women. Part of the ongoing Curious Minds series, the course is guaranteed to educate and fascinate. Details at hotdocs.ca.