This year, maybe for the first time, talk of the rise of the short film seems to be more than mere hype.
Granted, the selection at the Toronto International Film Festival is the usual mixed bag of mini melodramas, delirious dreams and a few superb works of short-form filmmaking - some which seem more like calling cards for would-be feature directors.
But what is changing is a growing receptiveness by audiences, and the film industry itself, to shorts, along with new ways in which such films are being shown, most notably by wireless services offering shorts via video cellphones.
"An interesting, overarching theme in the short-film world [involves]these new methods of delivery, and certainly the cellphone technology is a really exciting new one - it particularly lends itself to short films," says Ben Murray, a short-films programmer for the Toronto festival. "But at the same time, shorts are in the public consciousness a little bit more."
Last year's Academy Award-winning, digitally animated documentary Ryan helped turn the corner. The film, about the troubled life of genius Canadian animator Ryan Larkin, continues to make the rounds of festivals, and was turned into one of the National Film Board of Canada's biggest recent DVD releases.
" Ryan has shone a lot of residual light on shorts in general. It has the average audience member thinking about them and looking for ways to seek them out," says Murray, who also notes that television - most notably the cable channel Bravo! and CBC's Zed TV - continues to provide additional outlets for shorts.
Increasingly as well, shorts are becoming a good way to feed networks, cable channels and cellphone companies that are hungry for more content. In fact, shorts could soon become a common video service offered by cellphone companies, along with downloadable newscasts, video games, movie trailers and music videos.
But what's really interesting is how filmmakers will adapt the medium to these new platforms - and how the renewed interest in shorts is affecting filmmaking itself.
One obvious example is director Don McKellar's Phone Call From Imaginary Girlfriends. He made two versions of this short - one from a young woman in Ankara, another from a woman in Istanbul. Like a personal videophone call, the woman in each short says how much she misses the viewer.
Both were commissioned by Bravo!FACT and the NFB as part of their Shorts in Motion selection of five cellphone films, and have been available for video cellphone users since June. In fact, McKellar's two shorts were shot using a video cellphone, so they have that digital, pixilated picture breakup common to cellphones. The effect is like a loving (although fake) phone call, but also like a melancholic View-Master reel with fleeting glimpses of Turkey.
"Basically, I thought, 'What would we actually want to see on a cellphone?' I couldn't think of a lot except a nice long-distance phone call from a girl who says she loves you," says McKellar. The two shorts have also been enlarged to 35-mm prints and will be shown at the Toronto festival, where the intimate message and kaleidoscopic pixilated picture quality will no doubt have a slightly different effect when blown up on the big screen.
Toronto-based filmmaker and TV host Sook-Yin Lee has also contributed a short, titled Unlocked, to the cellphone series, and it will also play at TIFF. About a young, urban couple facing the end of their relationship, it's more conventionally made: Lee explains that the cellphone project limited the length of the shorts to just three minutes, and that, because they are accessed by phone customers in two parts, the first 90 seconds of the film had to end with a cliffhanger.
"Having to pack in a story that exists on its own within those confines was a really interesting exercise," Lee says, adding that she chose to film a lot of the action close-up so that it would register well on a tiny phone screen.
Another aspect of the Bravo!FACT/NFB cellphone project is that the filmmakers didn't retain copyright to their films - because they were commissioned works. If projects like this continue to succeed, more financiers may be interested in commissioning such work, making short-form filmmaking more than just a labour of love.
"The idea that you can't make dough from short films is a fallacy," says Lee, who has also made shorts for which she has retained the copyright. "You have to find a distributor who can go to bat, and hopefully if the film is good enough, people want to buy and rent it and you will receive royalties for each time it plays."
Toronto director David Hyde's short, Leo, about a hapless flower deliveryman, was partly financed through a scheme in which some of its funders, such as the Toronto production house macIDeas, get first dibs on financing the project if it is turned into a feature. Leo is also being shown at the Toronto festival, and Hyde says that part of his mission during TIFF is to pitch his feature treatment and look for additional backers.
Another filmmaker in the festival, Greg Spottiswood, says that he doesn't shy away from the fact that his short, Noise, acts somewhat as a calling card. However, Spottiswood, an actor turned screenwriter, says that he made his short, about a game between a boy and his father that turns emotionally gruelling, largely as an exercise in directing actors in spontaneous-seeming acting techniques.
Throughout the short, the father in the film is standing outside a locked car, talking to his son, who is inside. The filmmaking appears seamless, although the constantly flipping perspective from within the car to outside of it meant having to make 258 edits and create a complex sound mix.
As a calling card then, the short doesn't work so well, Spottiswood jokes - because the whole point was to make the direction seem invisible. Of course, that in itself shows the level of sophistication of short filmmaking.
But even when times are looking good for shorts, there's still the orthodox view that their market is extremely limited. Just ask Vancouver-based director Matthew Swanson, whose film Hiro is a stylized, subtle, cleverly amusing take on Japanese gangster films, shot mainly in Japanese. "I wouldn't be upset if it never really got distribution," says Swanson. "It's a festival movie, and I hope as many people see it at festivals around the world as possible."
But restricting it just to festival audiences would be a waste. Hiro is commonly described as one of the most slickly produced, ambitious shorts in this year's TIFF - and yet more proof that the excitement surrounding short films may, in fact, be a lot more than simply hype.