Short Cuts Canada: Programme #3

Moody pilots and broken hearts fill out this shorts sampler.

By Angelo Muredda

Still from Le futur proche.

Various directors (Canada, Short Cuts Canada)

SCREENINGS:
Monday, September 10, 6:45 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 (350 King Street West)

Tuesday, September 11, 12:15 p.m.
TIFF Bell Lightbox 4 (350 King Street West)

When TIFF absorbed the Canada First program into Discovery, where first-time feature directors from around these parts are paired with international counterparts, Short Cuts Canada became the dedicated home for Canadian filmmaking at the festival. This year’s third shorts package is a good sampler, split fairly evenly between lyrical pieces and more formally experimental films, most of them comedic.

The best of the dramas is Sophie Goyette’s beautifully shot Le futur proche, a moving and refreshingly low-key look at a pilot who takes to the skies to recuperate from sad family news on the ground. Goyette’s aerial photography is gorgeous, and the sound design is a nice complement to her sensitive character study. Charles Officer’s 100 Musicians, about a couple’s disagreement over the substance of a mayoral announcement on the radio—who better to make an uncredited cameo, in archival footage, than Rob Ford himself?—is a bit shakier, but Officer puts the Dionne Brand short story on which the film is based to lovely use in an opening monologue about the ambiguous nature of cities.

Direct storytelling proves to be an asset here, as the least successful shorts tend to complicate matters needlessly with iffy aesthetic choices. Martin Thibaudeau’s Reflexions turns domestic abuse into a tasteless visual joke and an excuse for fancy camerawork, while Dusty Mancinelli’s Broken Heart Syndrome wastes its good acting and amusing situations with a few too many quirky stylistic riffs on indie romcoms, like fantasy sequences and split screens. Give credit to Trailer Park Boys creator Mike Clattenburg, then, for rounding out the program with the modest and sharply executed Crackin’ Down Hard, a 10-minute setup for a mordantly funny punchline.