It’s entirely possible that an early work by the next Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg will screen on Wednesday night at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. With the 2013 Student Film Showcase featuring the best from post-secondary schools around the country and the Next Wave Presents: Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase kicking off the evening with Toronto-area high-school students’ films, the night will be a coming-out party for a new crop of talent. Judging by the polished creativity of some of the entries, it’s safe to say that young people are more prepared than ever to start telling stories on film from an early age.
Among the Student Film Showcase’s impressive assembly of emotional family dramas, hilarious deadpan comedies, and vibrant animations, one of the most accomplished is Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg’s Noah. The Ryerson students weave a tale of a teenager’s breakup and subsequent breakdown using only his computer screen as the backdrop. With Facebook chats and Skype conversations providing the dialogue, this intimate dissection of how modern teens communicate validates its central conceit with brilliant execution. It was no easy feat bringing the idea to fruition.
“We had to create Facebook accounts for our characters and try to build a world for them to live in online,” the pair write in a joint email. “We would send each other Facebook messages in character and create fake events. It felt schizophrenic at times. We think if there is one question we wanted to ask with the film it’s, ‘What are computers doing to us?'” The two filmmakers see the endless potential of cyberspace as a double-edged sword.
Representing Vancouver is Langara College student Naomi Mark’s Genius: The Kevin Aussant Story. The film ostensibly tells the tongue-in-cheek tale of its own screenwriter’s struggles with his father, who stifled his creative genius from grade school to adulthood. Mark says Aussant’s script made a strong impression on her. “Having known Kevin for only a couple of months at that point, I wasn’t sure how to take it. I mean, who writes a script about himself in the first place, let alone one wherein he refers to himself as a genius?”
From there, Mark says it was a matter of working with the “real” Kevin Aussant to decide on the appropriate tone for this cutting parody of the biopic genre. “It was our intention to take the story itself as seriously as we could, while making a genuine and well-produced drama whose comedy hinges on such stereotypical tropes,” Mark says. She’s planning to submit the film to the Just For Laughs festival, and she’s already hard at work on a documentary about Vancouver, called Show Me What You Care About.
In the Young Filmmakers Showcase, it’s hard to miss Shant Joshi, because his name appears twice. He’s co-director of both The Fading Trillium, a documentary about the effects of Bill 115, and O99UPY, a look at the Occupy movement in St. James Park. The Markham high schooler has lofty aspirations. “My goal in life is to make an impact in the world, shake the foundations of our society, and change the way we think about how we live,” he says.
“Doing the The Fading Trillium was a much more personal experience for me,” he adds. “Having spent four years with my high school teachers and being in the middle of this employment dispute really got to me.” Not one to mow lawns during the summer like some teens, Joshi is instead planning a trip to Bahrain during which he hopes to film a documentary about the Bahraini uprising against the Hamad Khalifa monarchy, as well as Western involvement in smaller countries. He says, “It is a subject matter that many have become apathetic about and a condition I want to change in my community.”
This post originally mentioned that Shant Joshi’s name is “the only one that appears twice” in the Young Filmmakers Showcase. In fact, there’s another student who was also involved in two films. This post also incorrectly referred to the Next Wave Presents: Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase as “Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase.”