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| Bird Ramona Diaconsecu, courtesy of TIFF |
Canadian highlights in the shorts spectrum include new voices behind the camera, like acclaimed actor Molly Parker (Weirdos, House of Cards), who makes her directorial debut at Short Cuts this year. Parker’s Bird (Short Cuts Programme 3) is a refreshing and down to earth film that shows ample promise for Parker in the director’s seat. Parker smartly constructs her film as an actor’s showpiece and gives Amanda Plummer a juicy role as Sam, an alcoholic desperately struggling to take flight and find freedom. Bird is a sharply-focused family drama that Plummer carries with her mostly-silent performance as Sam searches for a family pet. As Sam hunts the bird in the trees around her childhood home, she revisits old memories that she longs to heal, and Plummer reveals Sam’s painful past with an understated performance. It helps, too, that Parker has some of the top talents in the Canadian scene helping bring out the best in Bird’s artistic vision with cinematographer Guy Godfree offering calming natural light, editor Matthew Hannam cutting together a subtly fractured time play, and composer Lesley Barber delivering a buoyant, hopeful score. Bird lets Parker expand her golden wings even wider than before.
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| Bickford Park Courtesy of TIFF |
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| Threads Courtesy of TIFF |
Another down to earth family fable joins Bickford Park in Short Cuts Programme 1. Threads is the latest NFB co-production from Oscar winner Torill Kove (The Danish Poet, Me and My Moulton) that spins a yarn about the endearing connections between parents and children. Kove’s signature storybook animation and hand drawn pastel palette offers a fine counterpoint to the bracing black and white of Bickford Park as it probes one’s desire for intimacy and connection in the suffocating urban void. Quirky, humorous, and driven by a jazzy shuffle of a score by Kevin Dean, this enchanting fable is draws us close with its wonderful simplicity.
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| Imagined Conversations: Stephen Hawking and Kanye West Courtesy of TIFF |
Also screening in Short Cuts Programme 1 is a completely different tale of strangers forging a connection. Imagined Conversations: Stephen Hawking and Kanye West from Bacon and God’s Wrath director Sol Friedman is about as off the wall and ridiculous as one hopes it could be. The film features the genius with a voicebox putting up with Kanye West’s ever-ballooning ego for an exchange that stretches from "Hotline Bling" to the origins of the universe. Conversation is irreverently funny and totally un-PC as it imagines a badass Hawking and a whiny West. It’s so funny because the spirit of the two talkers seems genuinely true. Just go with it and this short is one of the funniest things you’ll see at the festival.
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| Latched Courtesy of TIFF |
The only thing more effed up than Stephen Hawking’s fictitious backstory is the tale of monstrous mommyhood in Latched (Short Cuts Programme 6). Latched, a downright nasty body horror comedy directed by Justin Harding and Rob Brunner, casts Harding’s wife Alana Elmer and their baby son Bowen in an icky but hypnotic story of a dancer/choreographer who retreats to the woods with her son and gives birth to a demonic fairy that threatens to destroy their family. Elmer has a fluid, free-form style to her dancing as the mother whirls around the screen in a kind of corporeal babel while the sinister fairy, made up with impressive prosthetics, thirsts for her breast milk. At once an unsettling rape culture parable and a powerful story of the bond between mother and child, Latched is an uncanny shapeshifter.
Find more TIFF shorts in Short Cuts and more TIFF coverage here.
(With more reviews of Canadian shorts to come.)
TIFF runs Sept. 7-17. Please visit TIFF.net for more info.
