Worldwide Short Film Festival

ANIMATION DOMINATED THIS YEAR'S Worldwide Short Film Festival (held in Toronto), which kicked off with Destino, an unfinished Salvador Dali/Walt Disney collaboration from 1946. Recently completed by the Disney studio, this seven-minute gem features a wholesome Disney woman dancing across a Daliesque landscape of grotesque figures, broken bridges and eerie shadows. The blend of sweet and strange is beautiful, jarring and unique.

Along these twisted lines was Chris Landreth's Ryan, named the Best Canadian Short. Ryan is a dazzling yet bittersweet homage to Canadian animator Ryan Larkin. Marrying Larkin's real voice with futuristic 3-D CGI animation (courtesy of Seneca College), Ryan chronicles Larkin's rise as an NFB wunderkind, creating influential animation 30 years ago before nose-diving into years of substance abuse. Today, Larkin panhandles on the streets of Montreal. While Landreth places too much of himself in the film, he perfectly captures Larkin's innovative genius and self-destruction with characters who appear twisted and disembodied. Larkin's head is a decaying mass of flesh and eyeglasses, while his arms are scrawny and shrivelled like a corpse. Arguably, Ryan was the festival's crowning jewel.

Other Canadian animators shone. Masoud Raouf's Blue Like a Gunshot, Steven Woloshen's Minuet and Simon Goulet's Oio were sublime abstractions, playing with colour, shapes and music in different ways. By comparison, however, Canadian dramas were inconsistent. One exception was Noel Blank. Director Jean-Francois Rivard delivers a perfect twist ending to a dark story about a father suffering from Alzheimer's who doesn't recognize his son during Christmas dinner--in summer. Just as haunting was the wordless Song of Wreckage about a rural man who suffers guilt after a hit-and-run encounter with a deaf boy. Director Ryan Redford skilfully employs music, sound and montage to create a taut film.

Canadians are a funny bunch. For some reason, we make great comedy shorts but not features. Jesse McKeown's The Big Charade is a hilarious send-up of corny Hollywood action flicks, cut like a movie trailer. A haunted charades champ hunts for his father's killer in the big city, confronting every action-movie cliche in the book. Albert Nerenberg's 120-second Kung Fu Jesus literally turns the martial arts and Biblical genres on their heads. Meanwhile, Brian Stockton presented another dry and laconic valentine to his hometown with the dry and laconic Saskatchewan Part 2. Stockton finely captures the flatness and charm of the Prairies on film. In Toronto, James Genn offered The Dog Walker, an amusing tale about a love-struck geek who walks dogs for a living.

Though the festival isn't renown for documentaries, Hubert Davis's Hardwood stood out. Recently acclaimed at Hot Docs less than a month earlier, Hardwood was named the Best Canadian Documentary. It's a confessional story of Davis's dysfunctional family, centring around his wayward father, a former Harlem Globetrotter, who reconciles with his estranged white wife and their children. The movie is powerful, candid and painfully honest. Internationally, outstanding films included France's enchanting yet bizarre The Man without a Head capturing the love life of a headless bachelor; Slovenia's poignant (A) Torsion, where a sick cow unites a choir of refugees during the siege of Sarajevo; and the German comedy (no, that's not a typo) Meine Eltern, where a teenage girl pretends to her boyfriend that her uptight folks are cool and liberated.

Overall, the festival started strongly and maintained a consistent level of film programming. The Mexico spotlight was tailored to the themes of love (the sensitive Guts and Heart starring a young Gael Garcia Bernal of Y Tu Mama Tambien), lust (the old-fashioned farce You Owe Me), God (the enigmatic The Miracle) and death (award-winning animations No Support and Down To the Bone). Predictably, the program of Celebrity Shorts was a crowd-pleaser. Actress Illeana Douglas delivered a great satire on Hollywood celebrity by working the aisles in Supermarket ("Hey, aren't you...?"). Bob Odenkirk parodied film festivals in The Frank International Film Festival where an ordinary Joe named Frank holds his own festival in his living room.

Seminars and workshops offered a strong lineup of industry gatekeepers and star filmmakers. The biggest star, Albert Maysles (here to pitch his own project) enlivened one seminar when he declared Michael Moore "a son of a bitch" to a stunned crowd. It appears that neither Maysles nor Allan King are fond of Moore's style of in-your-face documentaries. The real talk of the festival, however, was the festival itself. Traditionally a mid-June affair, Worldwide Shorts moved up a full month this year, slamming head-on into the ReelWorld/Images/Hot Docs/Inside Out train. Worldwide Shorts honcho Shane Smith wanted to capture the tail end of the student audience in mid-May and secure the Isabel Bader Theatre, the classiest movie house in Toronto. This may have been a shrewd move, but it left movie junkies and industry people exhausted. Outside of the Toronto International Film Festival juggernaut in September, Toronto's film festivals are now crammed into a narrow window between early April and early June. This cheek-to-jowl scheduling testifies to the popularity of film in the movie-going capital of North America, but the question is: can all these festivals survive?

Allan Tong is a Toronto filmmaker and freelance journalist.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Canadian Independent Film & Television Publishing Association
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group