A World of Shorts: Festival Award Winners
The Worldwide Short Film Festival gets a victory lap.
Still from The Maker.
If you missed June’s Worldwide Short Film Festival (WSFF) and have been bemoaning the dearth of venues for good short films since, you’re in luck. The Bloor Hot Docs Cinema hosts a special program of this year’s festival award winners as part of A World of Shorts, its monthly screening series in conjunction with the Canadian Film Centre.
By its nature, shorts programming is a mixed bag: short is a flexible medium, after all, rewarding those with a taste for the heterogeneous. That’s particularly true of the WSFF, the largest international festival of its ilk in North America. Among the seven films making a victory lap is Aly Muritiba’s The Factory from Brazil, the Best Live-Action Short winner, about a mother’s prison visit to her son. Also returning is Christopher Kezelos’s Best Animated Short winner The Maker, about the Madonna of the animal kingdom, a protean rabbit-like creature that’s prone to reinventing itself. Disparate as they are, both films are now eligible for Academy Award consideration in their respective categories on account of their festival lauds.
In light of the program’s global slant, it’s heartening to see Canada represented by Franck Dion’s Edmund Was a Donkey, something of an animated riff on poor Bottom’s misadventures with an ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the winner of the Bravo! Fact Award for Best Canadian Short. Dion’s win at the festival is yet another feather in the National Film Board of Canada’s hat, coming off a strong slate of animated shorts in 2011, including Oscar nominees Wild Life and Dimanche.