Feature films and gala premieres tend to hog the spotlight at film festivals like TIFF, but if you're looking to expand your cinematic horizons here are seven extraordinary short films worth checking out!
In honour of the shortest day of the year, the NFB has put together three packages of short films to commemorate the occasion!
The shorts that make up Program 6 all address some kind of exploration. Exploration of other planets, other dimensions, or even just different ways of living. It’s a broad theme that brings with it the best and the worst of the Short Cuts Canada programs. A standout film, not just in this program but in […]
Featuring gorgeous backdrops and exquisitely framed cityscapes, the final program in the Short Cuts International series is filled with cinematic treats of film and animation, and also includes a unique use of 3D. The 3D technique is used by director Matthu Placek in his sprawling crane shot examination of the then abandoned future home of […]
The fourth program of TIFF’s International Short Cuts programming brings a focus on some individual narratives that use colorful and inventive techniques to examine such age old motivations as vengeance, humor and isolation. (Null) is a hyper stylized look at the day and evening of a female, all taken from the narrow focus of a […]
Short Cuts Canada Programme 5 seems to be where they put all the shorts that would show in front of the Midnight Madness features if TIFF programmed them that way. These are the genre shorts, the crude comedies, and the freaky deaky. The little bit of animated goodness that is Sol Friendman’s Day 40 posits what it […]
If there’s a unifying theme in programme 4, it’s the dichotomy of human experience. You can have the same job as somebody, the same parents, or even be in love with someone, and yet still experience the world in a completely different way. In Broken Face, a war veteran is “reintegrated into society” with a job […]
In fourth and final program of the Wavelengths short films series, entitled Night Noon, we enter the psyche and delve deep into the human experience. We begin with Malena Szlam’s Lunar Almanac, a four minute piece compiled together from still photographs of the moon over various nights. The moon becomes moons as the photographs are […]
In Wavelengths Program 3, Tales Told, we deal with the structure of narratives, and observe as they are manipulated and conveyed, with varying results. Yuri Ancarani’s San Siro is filmed in and around the football stadium in Milan of the same name. We watch as preparations are made before the match- the tedious, arcane details […]
In Wavelengths shorts program 2, Something in the Atmosphere, we have strange encounters with both the past and present through a series of jarring, evocative and visually arresting films. Toronto artist Jean-Paul Kelly channels Truman Capote’s desire in his short film The Innocents. The focus is a shot-by-shot re-enactment of a scene from With Love […]
The third program of TIFF’s Short Cuts International focuses on the everyday decisions and words we use and how the impact of those decisions and dialogue, or lack of them, can be just a world shaking as the ones we agonize over. In The Tricycle Thief director Maxim Bessmertnyi takes us to Macau and into […]
The second program in the Short Cuts International program features films that revolve around desire and the lengths some will go to fulfil them, from looks at forbidden love to the quest for an elusive ice cream cone. Kaveh Ebrahimpour’s debut short from Iran, A Ceremony for a Friend drops us in the middle of […]
The first program for the brand new Short Cuts International program this year at TIFF looks largely at the perceived rules and attitudes that we as humans aspire/adhere to within social contexts and how easily that bond can be manipulated. The Warren deals with a nighttime Israeli Defense Force raid into the titular refugee camp, […]
The third program of the Short Cuts Canada series is a stellar line-up of shorts about various forms of societal marginalization or the awkwardness felt by being an outcast. There isn’t one out of the bunch that doesn’t muster up true emotion or deeply contemplative thoughts about how we approach and deal with people who […]
Considering that the major showpieces of this year’s opening Short Cuts Canada program are a restorations of a pair of iconic national classics, it only stands to reason that the rest of the films should fall in nicely behind them. Recently restored to its 3D glory for the digital age, Norman McLaren’s stereoscopic opus Around […]
