With all the buzz around world premieres and gala events happening at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s easy to forget there is also a pretty stellar shorts program in the mix. Consisting of work spanning all genres, the format is a great way to experience new, upcoming talent as well as to check up on a couple familiar faces too. And—new this year—24 hours after their Festival premiere, films will be available to screen at YouTube.com/TIFF until September 19.
The following is a collection of capsule reviews, scores, full shorts where available for each film in screening block 4.
Paradise Falls – 17 minutes
Writer/director Fantavious Fritz returns to the TIFF Short Cuts Programme this year with his off-kilter coming-of-age tale Paradise Falls. Appropriately labeled Wes Anderson meets Brothers Grimm, a storybook mythology is created for the titular neighborhood through the words of a narrator (Alex Crowther) ushering us through its history. What once was a grand development idea built atop a cemetery and sacred land was now simply deserted fodder for adolescent dares of local children. The developer himself even left his mansion after daughter Eleanor (Daiva Zalnieriunas) died in an automobile accident that may or may not have been a direct result of a curse put upon her for his deeds.
As of the moment the narrator completes his lesson, however, no one had entered the abandoned house due to fear of what might happen in the darkness. It’s young Sonny (Alistair Ball) and Dirk (Uri Livene-Bar) who leave their homes to be the first at trying their luck, finding its structure’s empty rooms and expansive acreage a perfect place to take up permanent residence. Surviving on poached stray cats and dogs plus the miraculous growth of edible foliage courtesy of planted sticks and seeds, the two have become self-sufficient in a way they never could have dreamed possible. The house almost appears to be giving them everything they could ever want, keeping them present so that the ghost of Eleanor will no longer have to be alone.
Quirky and strange, this story is told with the utmost seriousness despite the outlandish things that occur. It allows Fritz to film some stunning frames whether a The Shining-esque bike ride through hallways, soiled plants growing in bathtubs and toilets, or Eleanor’s ghost eventually serving as their mentor/mother in lieu of school and family. There is a whimsy to the narration that overshadows the otherwise dark subject matter until the whole thing blows up in some grand metaphor of freedom, adulthood, and responsibility away from the constraints of society. The path contains horror elements, oddball comedy, and adolescent angst in ways that prove as infuriatingly saccharine as they do endearing. Creative and attractive, it’s unfortunately hard to see its ambition as more than unnecessary excess.
B-
Yellowhead – 19 minutes
A meditative tome on industrialization along its titular Trans-Canada Highway, Yellowhead portrays one of the many men ensuring factory safety as he completely disregards his own. A cog in the machine like any of the workers or processes performing on multiple sites visited with his clipboard, it’s easy to pretend he is outside looking in. He’s (Paul McGillion) just doing his job, providing for his family with four-week stints on the road, and ignoring the signs of stress ravaging his body in the meantime. With a cough strong enough to warrant a doctor’s visit, ideas it’s merely that of a cold and not the chain-smoking, panic attack inducing day-to-day is but one example of his forgetting to check his own boxes before clearing himself for duty.
Shot with a steady hand, writer/director Kevan Funk pulls no punches as we see the dark and dirty factory floors, the general malaise of repetition, and the aftermath of what his failure to be comprehensive can result in through a gentleman at a gas station with a head covered in burns. This is the life he has become a part of, one of blue-collar businesses with colorful pasts of tragedy and success where his series of stock issues to check distract him from the reality of what they all add up to. He has been pulled into the depression, anxiety, and poor health like the rest, spending free time at the bar ignoring his wife’s calls with excuses he hopes can wipe his problems away proving how entrenched he has become.
It’s McGillion’s performance that shines alongside the contemplative camera capturing his slog through days searching for the kinds of shortcuts in his personal life that he can’t let slide on the job. His world is one so many rely heavily upon—whether citizens, companies, or cities—in order to stay afloat. Yellowhead shows the industrial machine’s prevalence along the highway with dreary hardworking life piled upon dreary hardworking life. It shows the futility of finding answers or escape with time becoming an unaffordable luxury when the few minutes of silence on the conveyor belt of a car wash provide the only respite from an existence too many share: one where the ability to keep going at present comes at the expense of any assured longevity.
B
A Time is a Terrible Thing to Waste – 3 minutes
Written/narrated by Glen Johnson and directed/animated by Leslie Supnet, children’s short A Time is a Terrible Thing to Waste looks and feels just like a Little Golden Book with its watercolor aesthetic and minimal vignettes on white. Detailing the thought process of an anxious squirrel named Norman as he awakens for the day, numbers get thrown about in the context of being earlier or later than the broken watch face’s declaration of 4:00 am. Cutely monotone in his quasi-educational cadence, Johnson gives us the creature’s over-active, nervous hypotheses rather than simply having him get out of bed to learn what time it truly is.
Too esoteric for young kids and too overly childish in its visuals for adults, the 3-minute short plays out more as a showcase for Supnet’s artistic style than anything else. Goofy flourishes like watching the squirrel procrastinating at work with a stapler rather than counting the nuts on his desk add nice comedic personification, but the whole proves way too philosophical for its delivery method. Perhaps that’s the point, juxtaposing grade school-targeted cartoon with pithy ideas of self-reflection but to me it just seems as though it’s a well-meaning yet incomplete idea.
C+
Relax, I’m From The Future – 5 minutes
In the middle of tape-recording his final words before shooting himself in the head, Percy Sullivan (Rick Roberts) is abusively interrupted by a man claiming to be from the future (Zachary Bennett). Whether or not he’s telling the truth about what time he’s from, however, nothing is said or seen to understand why this stranger would care about what Sullivan does to himself. It might be ego or a hero complex, but Bennett’s attempt at changing the future quickly evolves into the sort of action that may earn him an integral role in the act itself. That’s how these time travel pieces go after all—one small butterfly wing flap bringing down an empire.
In Luke Higginson‘s Relax, I’m from the Future, this flap may simply make a man who is about to shoot himself jump off the roof instead. The end result is the same while the unwarranted alteration changes the act itself as well as possibly the identity of who’s ultimately responsible for it. So we watch these two men comically wrestle atop a building with one wanting nothing more than to stop his suffering and the other desperately trying to keep it going. Bennett bribes Sullivan, tells him he’s special, and goes to the kind of dangerous lengths that may in fact be more detrimental to his health than the gun.
A funny gem of a conversation on its own, the exchange acquires an even deeper meaning via a conclusion that educates on exactly who this mystery man is and the context of his helping Sullivan. Higginson plays with cause and effect logic through this act of heroism gone wrong—whether by result or motive. We find it easy to assume a man with a gun is the victim of unforeseen circumstances without questioning the myriad ways in which someone would contemplate suicide. Roberts’ character is therefore as much an enigma as Bennett’s, allowing the final revelation to put an even more hilarious spin on what’s already absurdly comic in its high-concept plot.
B+
Sam’s Formalwear – 15 minutes
With his reign as town prom king at its close, Sam Parrish (Judah Katz) finds himself at a crossroads in life he simply is not prepared for. To him he’s still Big Man on Campus with his prom queen wife Maggie (Kristina Nicoll) at home and daughter Shannon (Sofie Uretsky) readying for her own experience with a corsage. In reality, however, his formalwear rental business is floundering, he’s been divorced long enough to make not correcting his friends weird, and lives like a child frozen in time while they all grow older and further apart. Unwilling to evolve, he’s about to lose everything his warped mind still believes is true for good.
Centered on the teenage immaturity spewed forth from this middle-aged man, Katz shoulders the bulk of the aptly named Sam’s Formalwear with his oblivious giddiness and complete ignorance to the consequences of his actions. He yearns to return to better days as his world crumbles around him, grasping at straws to fit in with his daughter and pretend his ex-wife doesn’t hate him with every fiber of her being. So he dons a tuxedo, hops in his car, and looks to join in the fun at Shannon’s high school prom despite not being invited. The reality of such a creepy endeavor quickly rears its head, but Sam might be too far-gone to get the hint.
Director Yael Staav gets some nice shots of Katz floating underwater in the local pool, kicking broken glass underneath his kitchen counters, and wallowing in insecurity during a commercial shoot with his actual self in front of a green screen at left next to the finished superimposition on a teleprompter at right. You feel sorry for the character until you realize nothing is going to ever set him straight from the course towards mid-life crisis he’s paved while Ted Pauly‘s script infuses enough laughter to make it both sad and funny to watch him vehemently refuse to become disillusioned. They may give us one too many examples of such flights of fancy, but they’re not without humor in their attempt.
B-
Nous avions [Time Flies] – 18 minutes
Writer/director Stéphane Moukarzel‘s Nous avions [Time Flies] contains a few beautifully orchestrated long-takes with characters traveling around in circles as time advances and returns to enhance the dueling depictions of brothers Akram (Liridon Rashiti) and Irfan (Avinas Gnanapragasam) as they grow into men. More than that, though, it also shows the cyclical nature of adolescence in general and the repetition of teenage angst parents must endure until all their children officially fly the coop. For Sameer (Minoo Gundevia) and Zakla (Deena Aziz), the current handful is seventeen-year old son Akram, rebelling against tradition as he readies to leave his Montreal home for Paris in 1999. It’s inevitable, however, that they’ll experience it again soon with Irfan.
As their first taste of ungrateful free spiritedness, Akram and Sameer’s conflict becomes one of hateful words and hotheads. After slaving as a taxicab driver to afford the best education for his three children, watching his son push against their Sunday ritual watching airplanes fly overhead is a tough pill to swallow. With little Irfan still captivated by the giant beasts in the air, Sameer can afford being insolent himself, writing off his eldest son as he has him without yet realizing time and maturity’s power to transform the most jadedly resolute minds. So, as present-day Akram fights this familial bond, his future self looks back to remember the simple days with fondness just as Irfan reaches his own rebellious age.
Moukarzel’s opening scene of Irfan running around the house—airplane in hand—as the family hustles to get ready before Sameer arrives is full of kinetic energy and joy. The boy’s face is lit up with excitement while Akram’s contrasts it in dejection and indifference to exiting his bed. It’s a wonderful precursor to a later moment of the elder boy’s future self exiting a cab at the place he used to spend each Sunday, that old day from 1999 continuing before him as his former self returns to their picnic blanket. In one flew swoop we transition from present drama to past memory, watching the inevitable growth we’ve all gone through unfold ahead of a new generation starting the cycle once more.
B+
Short Cuts Canada Programme 4 played at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10th & 11th.
