Which films do you like?
The question is like a handshake at the Toronto International Film Festival. You don't especially care which films the other person enjoyed. It's more of a salutation among those in the club of festival-goers, film-industry people and media.
But in the TIFF sub-community of short-film devotees, the question takes on real meaning. And when it's asked by Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo, a short-film programmer at the festival, it sounds far more genuine.
Why? There's such a wide variety of styles in the Short Cuts Canada programs, depicting everything from hyper-realism to arty abstraction and every kind of experimentation in between, that you feel compelled to ask someone else their preferences, simply to get a better sense of your own.
“I think that's the beauty of Short Cuts Canada. There's such a huge range of styles and forms and genres among the work,” Smoluch Del Sorbo said.
Many of the films this year are by filmmakers with stellar reputations for shorts, such as Chris Landreth, who directed the Oscar-winning 2004 animated short Ryan and returns with The Spine , the story of a relationship literally losing its backbone, and Cordell Barker, maker of the Oscar-nominated 1988 short The Cat Came Back and here this year with The Runaway .
Then there are the shorts by filmmakers known more for their feature-length work. Guy Maddin's Night Mayor , produced by the NFB, is about a frenetic hobbyist who enlists his family (including rather pretty daughters) to capture TV pictures of the aurora borealis. Meanwhile, Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn are executive producers of Tungijuq , a film by Félix Lajeunesse and Paul Raphaël, commenting on traditional Inuit hunting in a fantastical way, vaguely similar to the films of American artist Matthew Barney.
“It is important for us to build strong relationships with Canadian filmmakers, and it's important for us to develop audiences for those filmmakers,” Smoluch Del Sorbo said. “We've always been huge champions of Guy Maddin's work, so it's important to present his latest, best films to audiences, because that's what we want to do to connect Guy with his audience here.
“But at the same time, we want to show the best work out there. So it's not automatic that a filmmaker will get [his] film in the festival.”
Indeed, the appeal of shorts is to watch the best from emerging artists. Highlights include La Chute by Ivan Grbovic, a portrait of a woman in crisis, with each simple scene leading to a very subtle, unspoken tension. There's also Caroline Monnet's beautiful Ikw é, an exquisitely shot experimental film about the fluidity of messages passed through time. Possibly the most intriguing short is Nicolas Pereda's Interview With The Earth , featuring two young brothers in a Mexican town coming to terms with the loss of their father.
“When we set out to put together the program, we don't actually think about films that will run well together necessarily,” Smoluch Del Sorbo said. “We basically look for what we feel are the strongest films we see. So regardless of whether they are animation or experiment or narrative or documentaries, it doesn't matter. We don't have any requirement when it comes to the types of films that we program.”
City Sonic series
Toronto is a city of neighbourhood pockets, and City Sonic is an impressive series of short films, each one devoted to a Toronto musician telling stories of how she or he developed an affinity for one of those pockets. The series is part of the Toronto International Film Festival's lineup of free films at Yonge-Dundas Square which runs all week.
Of course, the films aren't really about the actual neighbourhoods, but about the local musical gathering places that resonated with those performers. Serena Ryder says the Dakota Tavern became a haven after her arrival in the big city. For Danko Jones, playing in Maple Leaf Gardens epitomized rock greatness. Geddy Lee remembers Massey Hall, where as a teen he saw Cream perform. Divine Brown says that, for her, The Rex was the place to be.
Interestingly, the importance of each place seems to stem mainly from youthful ambition. However, one of the films concentrates more on the love of a certain locale in adult terms. That's the one with Jason Collett, about his fondness for Kensington Market. You get the sense the neighbourhood is still growing on him.
