Get on the phone. Get online. If you’re a Luddite, get thee to Canada Post. Whatever your preferred mode of communication, short filmmakers, start using it immediately if you want to sell your film.

Certainly, you’re to be congratulated for having had your short – under 70-minute film – selected in the Perspective Canada program. And, while a few prestigious buyers and distributors of short product will be at the Toronto International Film Festival to appraise the films and the talent behind them, many won’t bother coming to see this group of 37. Although the Internet looks to be short films’ Wild West for the new millennium, sellers who want an upfront sense of potential audience, both size and demographics, should also look for traditional distribution via cinema and tv.

Kelley Alexander, director of the festival’s Rogers Industry Centre, says some Canadian and international buyers are booked to attend the fest, but adds that television distribs are ‘more likely to travel to a television market where there would be a better fit’ between product on offer and programming strands. Just the same, Sydney Neter, ‘one of the largest short film distributors in the world,’ will make the trip from the Netherlands, as will buyers from a handful of tv stations, particularly specialty channels.

Meantime, the hot sales opportunities are taking the form of buyers looking for Web content. Significant among them, says Alexander, is Adam Flick, president of u.s. company Atom Films – which acquires short films to distribute online – who will join the festival’s Net Works! panel to discuss what’s up with Web content. As technology gradually eases the pain of viewing previews, trailers, or entire films online, Alexander predicts filmmakers will have ‘to grow and adapt in whatever way the Web evolves.’

Even if the festival is not the best place to find a buyer, Alexander says it’s still an excellent venue to generate media attention and to alert feature buyers and critics about up-and-coming talent. She says sellers can spotlight positive write-ups on marketing materials and in verbal pitches to buyers.

Stacey Donen, associate programmer of the Perspective Canada program, says the films vary widely in quality, but overall he’s ‘pretty impressed. It was difficult to get [the selection group] down to the number we are running.’

Of 320 shorts submitted this year, 37 are to screen, ranging in length from four minutes to 34.

The titles cover many perennial themes – family dynamics, coming-of-age, gay and lesbian, experimental – and include live action and animation, but Donen says a few defy exact characterization. He says director David Christensen of Calgary presents Fit, the 23-minute, genre-blending story of a young boy who works with his father in a funeral parlor and who draws unusual inferences from the day-to-day events surrounding death. ‘It’s quite a challenging film in its composition and its structure,’ says Donen. ‘It’s got a very unique vision of the world.’

In another atypical entry, Fries With That, Toronto filmmaker Christopher McKay creates a ‘funny and really touching’ animated production using toilet paper rolls.

‘All in five minutes.’

Here, some of the directors with shorts in the Perspective Canada program discuss their films, the challenges of genre, and the importance of making a short to help launch a feature career.

Susan Tolusso

Michael Crochetiere

Subterranean Passage

it took 10 years for Michael Crochetiere to find a home for the footage he shot for Subterranean Passage after graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989. That year, Crochetiere embarked on a bold venture in improvisational filmmaking with four children and a 16mm camera. ‘It was very rambling…It was very much a learning experience and way too ambitious a project,’ Crochetiere says of his project, shelved for the last decade.

This year, Subterranean Passage emerges at tiff as a 31-minute, nonlinear experimental film that explores the power of imagination in children.

A native of Regina, Crochetiere completed the film for $100,000 through grants from a full range of national and provincial funding organizations, including the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative, Saskatchewan Arts Board and Canada Council.

Crochetiere, who teaches film studies and film production at the University of Regina, won accolades in 1996 for his short film Nocturne, which was screened at 34 international film festivals and won eight awards, including Best Experimental Film at the Victoria Independent Short Film and Video Festival.

Toronto will be Subterranean Passage’s world premiere. So far, the film has been sold only to the Saskatchewan Communications Network, Crochetiere says.

Subterranean Passage, which Crochetiere describes as having a ‘dramatic shape rather than a definite narrative,’ deals with how children draw ideas and energy from parental discord. Taking its cues from poetry, the film employs recurring motifs of sounds, rhythms, colors and dramatic situations to express the central theme.

‘You never see the parents, you just hear them. [The children] create a variety of fantasy landscapes and interior sets as a response to these arguments, as a way of dealing with it,’ Crochetiere says.

Although Subterranean Passage had no screenplay, Crochetiere and poet Barbara Klar wrote original poetry for the film and musicians Robert Rosen and Shawn Bell composed ‘electro-acoustic’ orchestrations.

The film was originally shot in Chicago about a year after Crochetiere received his master’s degree in filmmaking from the Art Institute. Crochetiere shot more footage earlier this year in Regina to ‘complement the original footage and give it a more linear shape.’ Crochetiere also used footage from the 1989 shoot on a second short, Dark Flowers, a 28-minute companion film that is currently in post.

With these shorts under his belt, Crochetiere plans to turn his attention to making his first feature, an as yet untitled story about children of divorce – a theme with its roots firmly embedded in Subterranean Passage.

Peter Vamos

James Genn

Second Date

shot in two days with two actors in one location, Second Date is an 11-minute comedic drama about a short-lived relationship that takes place in one afternoon.

‘If you keep it simple, you can do it all on a computer before you start shooting, kind of like a weekend project,’ says Vancouver-based writer, director, coproducer, editor and sound editor James Genn.

Coproduced with Jessica Fraser of Vancouver’s Boneyard Film Company (Kissed) on a budget of $20,000, Second Date, which will air on cbc’s Canadian Reflections in November, premiered at the 1999 Local Heroes festival in Edmonton and was soon after nominated for Best Short Under 30 Minutes at this year’s Yorkton Short Film & Video Festival. The film also screened at Palm Springs in May.

Second Date is about a girl and a guy who get together for a second time when she returns to his apartment, after a sordid first date, to retrieve her glasses. They have coffee, bad communication, she leaves and the film ends.

‘The story is shaved down to be as simple as possible. The dialogue is irrelevant because it’s a feeling piece with ebbs and flows, which is something shorts can accomplish better than features,’ says Genn, who spends the bulk of his time working as a sound designer/editor on other people’s projects. In the last three years, he has cut soundtracks on such films as Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed; Jonathan Tammuz’s Rupert’s Land, for which he received Genie and Leo nominations; Mort Ransen’s Touched and My Father’s Angel. Genn also did sound design on Reg Harkema’s A Girl is a Girl, debuting at this year’s tiff.

However, Genn, who has made two shorts and a doc, is quick to point out that ‘making short films gives you the opportunity to practise the craft and the confidence to know you can pull it off.’

And now that Genn knows he can pull it off, he’s ready to make the leap to feature filmmaking.

Meantime, he’s in discussions with a distributor in New York, who took an interest in Second Date after seeing it at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival.

Samantha Yaffe

Jackie May

Toy Soldiers

think back to when opening a new box of cereal was the treasure hunt of a lifetime; when you would dig and dig until you reached the prize submerged among the sugared flakes and wax paper. Now, think about what might have happened if the only prize you needed to complete a set landed in the hands of a rival classmate. That is the premise of Toy Soldiers, a six-and-a-half-minute, 35mm comedy based on a poem by stand-up comedian Al Rae, who narrates and stars in the film.

Directed by first-timer Jackie May and produced and written by her sister Catherine May of Working Dog Pictures in Toronto, Toy Soldiers garnered a handful of awards prior to production, including the 1998 National Screen Institute Drama Prize ($6,000 in cash and $5,000 in services), sponsored by WIC Entertainment, and close to $15,000 in services from the 1998 Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival screenplay contest.

In another vote of confidence, cbc prebought the short last summer to air this November on Canadian Reflections, giving the filmmakers a year to work the festival circuit.

Prior to appearing at tiff, the film screened at the Local Heroes International Screen Festivals in Edmonton and Winnipeg, the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival and the Rhode Island International Film Festival.

‘It’s a short film not a small film,’ says Jackie May, a screenwriter by trade. And she isn’t kidding.

With a 10-person cast, a 58-member crew, and such veterans as dop Adam Swica along with an entire camera crew from Psi Factor, who donated their time for a bottle of Scotch, and editor Susan Shipton (The Sweet Hereafter), it’s a wonder Toy Soldiers got made for only $22,000.

On the other hand, the film was awarded more than $65,000 in cash and services, including high-end camera equipment and filmstock and nobody was paid except the two child leads (Matthew Mahaffy and Kevin Frank).

‘If we had paid for everything, the budget would have been around $120,000,’ says Jackie May, who is currently working on her second short, Siblings, ‘a dark, bloody comedy.’

‘I need to make another short, with more traditional dialogue [as opposed to narration] before moving on to features.’

Samantha Yaffe

Jean-Francois Monette

Where Lies The Homo?

with his latest short, the bluntly titled Where Lies the Homo?, Jean-Francois Monette explores the emotional minefield of coming to terms with his own homosexuality.

The 34-minute film is the fourth short for the Montreal filmmaker, who has also produced a number of documentaries, most notably Anatomy of Desire, a coproduction with the National Film Board which aired in 1995 and 1996 on pbs, cbc and Discovery Canada.

Monette says he has no plans to sell his latest project, noting that it was made simply as a vehicle for personal expression. ‘I’m only showing it in festivals,’ he says. ‘That’s the only aim of the film, really.’

The $26,000 film, which won the Best Gay and Lesbian Film Award this year at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, was funded through the Canada Council and the nfb’s Filmmaker Assistance Program, which combined chipped in $21,000.

The film, which Monette spent three years editing, combines a rich array of archival footage, home movies and original sequences edited together in a montage over which a narrator retraces Monette’s self-discovery and the inner turmoil he suffered as a gay man in straight society.

Monette says his use of stock footage was partly a reaction to Celluloid Closet, a 1996 documentary that explored Hollywood’s treatment of gays in film. ‘I found it was lacking a lot of important elements in the history of gay cinema,’ he says. So the filmmaker set about weaving together a piece which he felt better represented the scope of gay cinema.

When he began, Monette says, he had no story in mind, just hours of footage. ‘It was only through months of solitude in front of the Steenbeck that I was able to get to it,’ he says.

‘I started writing narration, really to get these images moving. Then I added music. It was an interesting process. I’ve done straightforward documentary before and straightforward fiction, [but this] was completely new to me and I really let myself go in that.’

Alexandra Grimanis, whose short Mothers of Me is also entered in this year’s Perspective Canada program at tiff, did all the optical printing. In return, Monette edited Grimanis’ 15-minute film. The only other help Monette received was from dop Michael Wees, who worked for free, Monette says.

Monette is currently working on a 20-minute documentary about a painter, Rene Richard, who immigrated to Canada from Switzerland in 1909. It will run as a segment on A Scattering of Seeds, produced by Peter Raymont and Lindalee Tracey at Toronto’s White Pine Pictures, on History Channel and on Reseau de l’Information in Quebec.

Monette is also about to begin shooting another short, another coming-out tale, called Swiss Chalet.

Peter Vamos

Hope Thompson

Switch

sandwich a lesbian love affair within the classic film noir story, crunch it into 22 minutes, serve it up in the ’90s in a 16mm color format and there you have Switch, director/writer Hope Thompson’s fourth and perhaps final short film.

Produced by freelancer Sharon Brooks, the $60,000 camp thriller tells the story of Isabelle, a telephone operator living in Toronto in 1949 who is leading a double life. While her boyfriend is secretly making plans to elope with her to Niagara Falls, she begins having an affair with a female coworker, which ignites a filmload of double-crossing, broken hearts and murder.

‘I was trying to recreate a kind of skewed look at the past,’ says Thompson, who was inspired by Lynne Fernie’s doc Forbidden Loves (about lesbian sexuality against a pulp novel backdrop).

Having previously written and directed three shorts, all about seven minutes long, Thompson says Switch, which has been sold to cbc and will air on Canadian Reflections in November, was her most challenging work and a definite segue into feature filmmaking.

‘It is very polished with a high production value because what we were trying to do was make a mini-feature. And it gave us a lot of experience because we did a lot of the financing ourselves, and we even built all the sets ourselves.’

The film, made up of 25 crew members and a cast of five, was shot in six days at the Wallace Avenue Studios, where six sets were built – including a telephone exchange room, a bar interior and a bedroom – in one day by a group of 30 friends.

In addition to grants, the film was financed by donations and personal Visa cards, which Thompson says they’ll be paying off for a long time.

Switch will be making its world premiere at the tiff and can be seen again at the Vancouver International Film Festival later on in September.

Meantime, Thompson is in development on her first feature screenplay, which she is writing with partner Simone Jones. Currently titled Alibi, it’s a murder mystery set in small-town Ontario and heavily inspired by Hitchcock’s Rebecca.

Samantha Yaffe