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G'O Canada!
Award season kicks off with buzzy premieres and we place a light focus on The Toronto Int'l Film Fest
Jason Sondhi
September 08, 2023
Awards season is here officially, and short films have a place in each of the marquee fests: Venice hosted the premiere of Wes Anderson’s intriguing Netflix short film anthology, while Telluride debuts serial Oscar-nominee Ben Proudfoot’s latest. Yet my eye is drawn to Canada, which in September will host TIFF and OIAF, arguably the most important general, and animation, film festivals in North America respectively.
We’ll come back to Ottawa at the end of the month, but Céline is in Toronto which kicked off yesterday. We all know that TIFF is a huge festival, but you might not know that for many years its short programs were restricted to Canadian shorts. Only recently have they expanded to an international lineup and, under the leadership of Jason Anderson, become an increasingly important stop on the short film festival circuit. Of this year’s lineup we’re excited by the premiere of a new Renee Zhan animation, as well as The Passing, a short doc from the filmmaking duo of Patrick and Ivete. From a celeb standpoint, the fest has some options too, as Oscar-winner Riz Ahmed stars in a film from Yann Demange, and MacKenzie Davis (Station Eleven, Halt and Catch Fire) will be at the fest with her directorial debut, WOACA. Expect to hear more from us on the films at TIFF in the coming weeks and months!
📅 This Week on Short of the Week
Two docs kicked off the week, both centering, in a way, around migration. Paul Hairston (Lions in the Corner) returns to S/W with a piece that is exquisite in its doc craft as he constructs a succession of structurally tight, heartbreakingly moving mini-narratives, while Freedom Swimmer is a fascinating mix of filmmaking approaches. Olivia Martin-McGuire twins the story of a grandfather escaping China in the ‘60s with a daughter’s need to leave Hong Kong in 2019. To do so she enlists the aid of legendary animation production house Sacre Bleu and Agnès Patron, famous for her Cannes Official Selection short, L’Heure de l’ours.
We followed that with two scripted shorts: on Wednesday, Céline wrote about Regissøren (The Director), a darkly funny work from Norway that sees its writer/director duo Ingrid Liavaag and Linda Gathu, “…craft a clever satire of the current cultural industry where inclusivity is (sometimes) more performative than genuine.” Then, I wrote on Eugen Merher’s ambitious German student film, The Boy Who Couldn’t Feel Pain, which channels the neo-Americana of the Coens, Jeff Nichols, and Court 13 in an emotionally sincere bit of myth-making.
🪐 Shortverse Collections
Still from Meryam Joobeur’s film: “Brotherhood”
Speaking of TIFF, they do a thing every year that is quite clever and that other countries should copy. Unrelated to the Fall Festival, in December they put out a Top Ten list of Canadian films from that year. Just like a critic’s list, it’s a great recommendation system for audience discovery and as the years go by, a useful marker of trends in Canadian cinema.
Going with the general Canadian theme this week, I put together a collection of 1 film from each of the past 10 lists that are freely available to watch. I could’ve done one for each of the 16 years they’ve done a short film top ten frankly, but then there wouldn’t be that harmony of “10 for 10” y’know?
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Our other collection of the week continues the national cinema theme as Rob constructs a list of recent faves from Iran. From devastating dramas to innovative animations, the breadth of the country’s cinematic culture is on display. This is also a good reminder that there are still a couple of days left to submit to our Unsanctioned Shorts Competition!
