It’s a Canadian tradition. Critics, politicians and the public may question the worthiness of our feature film industry but few would deny that Canadians make great short films.

A slew of awards garnered at film festivals from Cannes to Tehran to Hiroshima testify to Canada’s dominance in the field. Yet for all the statuettes and certificates picked up both here and abroad, even the best of these films, whether animated, documentaries or experimental, too often get, well, short shrift.

Perhaps it’s because short works are associated with the National Film Board and the classrooms where we all had to see these films as kids. Possibly it’s because some of us view our propensity for creating short work as an accommodation to a Hollywood system that discourages feature film making except when it is financed through l.a. Whatever the reasons, it is a rare short film that attracts much in the way of media attention.

That’s a shame. Those who don’t attend the short film programs in tiff’s Perspective Canada series are missing out on some of the most delightful, moving, and radical material at the festival. Just look at some of the past winners of tiff’s John Spotton Award for Best Canadian Short.

Clement Virgo’s Save My Lost Nigga’ Soul is a moving and funny take on two brothers as told by a pal who is trying, unsuccessfully, to be a stand-up comic.

The storytelling is also sophisticated in John Greyson’s The Making of Monsters, a now-banned film, in which a scandalous case involving the murder of a gay man in Toronto’s suburbs is told through musical numbers which parody Kurt Weill’s music and features a reincarnated Bertolt Brecht as a catfish.

Mike Hoolboom’s notorious Frank’s Cock, featuring a then-unknown Callum Keith Rennie, tells the sad and bawdy tale of an aids victim while showing a plethora of images ranging from pornographic to romantic.

Short films are just as exciting in their own, distinctive ways as long-form films. Just as no one expects Alice Munro to stop writing short stories, perhaps we ought to relax and accept these films for what they are: exceptional efforts in a format that can be sophisticated, endearing or tough-minded.

Following are short takes on some of the Canadian short films featured at this year’s tiff.

Marc Glassman

*Abe’s Manhood

Director: Aubrey Nealon

This mockumentary is about a twentysomething painter who desires authenticity in his life. Mixing and matching rituals from South Asian, North American native and Judaic cultures, Abe figures he can reach maturity as an artist by fasting, not sleeping for three days and then – let’s cut to the chase – getting circumcised.

Not content to become a man on his own, Abraham allows a film crew to follow, step-by-step, as he reaches the fatal hour when a tattoo artist will slice and dice him into a painter with an altered attitude.

Vancouver director Aubrey Nealon made this droll film for $25,000 ‘and a lot of favors.’ He is currently attending the Canadian Film Centre’s director’s lab. It’s an environment where a young filmmaker can pick up a lot of professional tips. Abe’s Manhood comes equipped with a witty press kit that has as its memorable tag lines: ‘A small incision. A big decision.’ Clearly, Nealon understands that, through a proper build-up, this short film can generate interest in his career.

Like all truly funny films, Abe’s Manhood has, at its core, an interesting concept. ‘We don’t have a lot of meaningful traditions in modern life,’ points out Nealon. ‘People feel this, but often their response is symptomatic of the problem in the first place: they do a quick-fix grasp for spirituality.’

Nicely paced, with one very funny scene involving the tattoo artist and a balloon, Abe’s Manhood boasts well-modulated performances. An actor as a teen, Nealon made sure that his lead, Ryan Robbins, gave a restrained performance as the conflicted artist. Nealon rightly observes that ‘Ryan got the joke, but at the same time he was able to play it straight. That was the kind of humor we were going for, an understated, play-it-real approach.’

Nealon’s direction of Abe’s Manhood has already achieved one favorable result – winning the 2000 Shavick Award, a prize given annually to the best emerging director in Western Canada.

Abe’s Manhood screened at last month’s Montreal World Film Festival prior to its presentation at tiff.

Marc Glassman

*After Eden

Director: John Price

After Eden is an avant-garde film with an old-fashioned message. Director John Price has edited together a series of powerful, if disparate, filmed sequences, manipulated them through an optical printer, and put together a soundtrack that comments on the images that are being viewed.

The material is challenging and very much within the experimental film tradition in Canada. What is surprising is Price’s statement, which seems to amount to not much more than a denunciation of contemporary cities.

Organized by title cards, like a silent movie, Price’s film is structured around biblical or archetypal ideas. Starting with ‘After Eden,’ a lyrical prologue sequence with a baby, the film shifts to a text-based tale of a family losing its farm. ‘Leaving Home,’ the next chapter, is a train journey accompanied to the voice of a cowboy’s lament. ‘El Dorado’ follows, with a garish trip through Las Vegas. ‘Adam/Eve,’ Price’s most powerful chapter, contrasts the scene of a homeless man sitting, woebegone, outdoors on a couch with a rapid set of shots of a woman identified as a prostitute. Her portrait is complemented by an old recording of a preacher exorcising a devil from a woman. The final chapter continues the biblical theme with a preacher reading from the New Testament on the soundtrack. Here, Price shows images of empty streets, an airport baggage area, and cold, modern architecture.

Price is a former Montrealer who has spent most of his recent years in Vancouver, living in the East Side, near seedy Hastings Street. He admits ‘the profound disparity between the wealth and the poverty really affected me in Vancouver.’

A diary filmmaker, he shot most of the footage for the film on Super 8 over the past 10 years.

With After Eden, Price has attempted to deal with issues of poverty and alienation. An assistant camera operator for such industry projects as Mission to Mars, he shows here the technical ability to create beautifully photographed pieces that stand in stark relief to the glossy fare that he shoots in order to make a living.

Marc Glassman

*Atomic Sake

Director: Louise Archambault

Alcohol as the catalyst in the explosion of the safe assumptions and blithe comforts of friendship – it’s not a new dramatic premise, but it’s explored intriguingly in Louise Archambault’s 32-minute narrative Atomic Sake.

The title, of course, cleverly conjures the double entendre of the Japanese liquor and the bomb that decimated a society that seemed heterogeneous, impenetrable, imperturbable. Such seems the character of the friendship of three women who, as the film begins, come together to share, as Archambault explains, ‘a meal and copious doses of sake. As the conversation heats up, each reveals a secret that will test their friendship and perhaps their love lives.’ It all leads to the age-old question, ‘Is it always good to tell the truth?’

Atomic Sake unfolds in three segments, with one scene played three times, each time seen through the eyes of a different main character, and each revealing a little more information than the previous. ‘Each segment has a ‘mind movie,” says Archambault, ‘and each uses images to show the state of mind of each character.’

Although she originally shot on Super 16mm in black-and-white, the director/writer could not find a lab in Montreal that could blow it up to 35mm and retain pure b&w – and she couldn’t stretch her $130,000 budget to send it elsewhere – so the 35mm print has a ‘color tint.’

Already well-traveled on the festival circuit, Atomic Sake won the Jutra Award for Best Short Film last March, and won an award at an Italian Festival. Among its other stops, the film has played at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal last October, has exploded on fest screens in Croatia, Manchester and Taipei, and will head to fests in Winnipeg, Halifax and Vancouver this fall.

Francois Landry (Le Fantome des trois Madeleine) produced, with Andre Turpin (Maelstrom) as dop. Shot in 1998 and finished in October of ’99, the film’s funders include sodec, nfb (acic) and the Canada Council.

Susan Tolusso

*Bowie: One in a Million

Director: Janis Cole

It’s been 10 years since veteran screenplay writer and documentary filmmaker Janis Cole has directed a film. Bowie: One in a Million is clearly a personal project for the writer of the Gemini-nominated mow Dangerous Offender and codirector of the feature doc classic P4W.

Working on a minuscule budget of $5,000, raised mainly through a long-delayed grant owed her from the National Film Board for having won the John Spotton Award for Best Canadian Short at tiff in 1990, Cole has fashioned a hard-hitting indictment on domestic violence. The film is a biography of her friend Cathy Bowie, a French teacher who was killed by her estranged husband in what was termed a ‘domestic dispute.’

‘After Bowie was killed in ’93,’ she recalls, ‘it affected me so much that I started to hear about domestic violence cases all the time on the radio. I started to read about it all the time in the paper. I thought, ‘My God, isn’t anybody paying attention?’ I was devastated that there seems to be a licence to kill your partner, and most frequently it was men doing the killing.’

Years passed while Cole let her thoughts and feelings gestate and she worked on other projects. ‘Then a friend of mine saw Bowie’s former husband, out with another woman. I thought to myself, ‘She has a life sentence, she’s dead. He doesn’t have a life sentence, he’s out. Who knows if the woman he’s with even knows what happened in his past?’ That’s when I sat down and wrote the narrative.’

Using photographs gathered from Cathy Bowie’s closest friends and newspaper clippings of ‘domestic dispute’ deaths that Cole had collected, the filmmaker fashioned a film that is divided between the personal and the political. The first half of the film describes Cathy Bowie’s life through photos and an intimate voiceover by the filmmaker. In the second part, a collage of radio voices describing spousal abuse is accompanied by visuals of the newspapers Cole has archived.

Cole’s hope is that the film will be distributed to ‘people who work in distress centres, or in shelters, or who work with the United Way or with the foundations that help women.’

Marc Glassman

*The Hat/Le Chapeau

Director: Michele Cournoyer

It took veteran animator Michele Cournoyer four years and 4,300 drawings to create the stark, graphic story of an exotic dancer whose memories of being sexually abused as a child come flooding back when she sees customers in the bar wearing hats.

The six-minute nfb production, entitled The Hat/Le Chapeau, is the award-winning Cournoyer’s artistic rendering of her wish to ‘make a film on sexual abuse, with the ambivalence of sexual abuse, discussing the experience of both men and women.’

Cournoyer’s quickly drawn, spontaneous slashes of black ink on white paper – with the occasional blotch – allow for no soft edges in the story, as the grown-up dancer recalls a man, probably a relative, who defiled her when she was a little girl. She recalls pain, a scarred psyche, after he had touched her inappropriately as she lay in bed. As she dances, the hat before her becomes, as the film’s description says, ‘an overwhelming, invasive obsession, constantly resurfacing in a rapid and implacable succession of metamorphoses.’

‘It’s so direct,’ says Cournoyer of the technique. ‘When you draw something, you become the instrument, you’re part [in this case] of the little girl. When I drew the dancer, I became the dancer. It was so quick that I projected myself onto the drawing. I became the man, I became the little girl.’ Cournoyer says the original music, by Jean Derome, added tremendously to the challenging ambiance of this uncompromising, visceral film.

Completed in December 1999, The Hat has already had some important critical recognition, including an invitation to the 2000 Cannes Film Festival last spring, where it screened in the International Critics Week, and a screening at the Annecy animation fest in June, where it won a film critics prize. tiff marks the film’s North American premiere.

A film without words, The Hat was directed and animated by Cournoyer, who also wrote the scenario. Producers for the nfb’s French animation studio, who say the general budget came in at about $440,000, are Therese Descary and Pierre Hebert.

Susan Tolusso

*Lost Bundefjord

Director: Matt Holm

In wintertime, vast Lake Winnipeg freezes over and provides the setting for the ludicrously premised story of the Lost Bundefjord Expedition, which director Matt Holm says is ‘a fictional account of the last man-hauling expedition across Lake Winnipeg.’

Inspired by Holm’s and screenwriter Ian Handford’s mutual fascination with tales of polar exploration, the 15-minute short concerns the last three members of the disastrous expedition. They know their days are numbered and in voiceovers relate their thoughts to various journals and diaries.

‘What [Handford] did was take something that could have happened on any polar expedition and transplanted it to the Prairies,’ says Holm. ‘One of them is very angry, and another is in heavy denial. They know they’ve had it.’

Polar exploration piques Holm’s interest, he says, ‘because you have to figure out what their motivations were. There’s no real practical reason to be the first at the North Pole or the South Pole. These stories are amazing – the hardships they had to endure.’

The film includes one grizzly scene where an expedition member amputates his own frostbitten toes, however, Holm says he sees it as essentially a comedy.

‘It’s tongue in cheek – we both share a fondness for black comedy and bleakness, and in the absurdity of the situation we thought there would be lots of opportunities for humor.’

Written essentially as a hobby in the mid-1990s, the film came together very slowly, whenever those behind it had the time.

His years as a set decorator and art director came in handy when Holm put the four-day February 1998 shoot together. The budget of $7,500, from the Winnipeg Film Group, did not stretch to a paid crew and instead, ‘I pulled in a lot of favors.’

With locations free and only the three actors coming away with any hard currency, all that remained was to utilize the wfo’s equipment hire kits and editing facilities and one last called-in favor to cover sound design. In May of this year, the film was finished.

The Toronto festival marks the first screening of the short, with Holm and Handford eyeing cbc’s Canadian Reflections and The Comedy Network as potentially good ‘fits’ for a sale.

Meanwhile, the two are at work on their next project, another Manitoba-specific short, this time concerning a small-town baseball team ‘and their prodigious talents.’

Fiona MacDonald

*Monday With the Martins

Director: Jeffrey Erbach

Repressed sexuality is not a foreign subject in short films, but Manitoba filmmaker Jeffrey Erbach has put a unique spin on the topic with his short Monday With the Martins.

‘On the surface it is about a couple – the Martins – who have some problems, specifically because the husband doesn’t have a normal penis – it’s an arm with a fully functional hand,’ explains Erbach. ‘So on the surface it’s about a man who basically has an arm for a penis, but the underlying subtext of it all is heavily metaphoric and involves sexual repression.’

To compensate, Mrs. Martin, not benefiting much from her husband’s abnormality, turns to porn to get her kicks. How do they cope? According to Irvak, his audience will find out – and in under four minutes.

The film was written, produced and directed by Erbach on a budget of $2,000. The entire exercise took three months (two days shooting, with the rest of the work done in post). Monday With the Martins was financed by the Winnipeg Film Group, with indirect support from Manitoba Film and Sound Recording Development Corporation.

The film, says Erbach, plays out more as a ‘color slide show,’ thus enabling the filmmaker to show the penis/arm without having it look phony.

‘The format afforded us the opportunity to throw a prosthetic in the guy’s pants and actually have an arm with a hand sticking out of his zipper because it didn’t have to grab things or throw things, it just kind of had to lay there,’ says Erbach. ‘While he is getting into bed it kind of opens the covers for him and things like that.’

With the film clocking in at under four minutes, Erbach says he has mixed feelings about the finished product. He says although he is proud of the film, he wishes he could have let his views on the subject matter go a little further.

‘When you see it, it feels too short,’ he admits. ‘I’m tackling, metaphorically, a difficult subject and one that has a lot of weight. To do it in 3.5 minutes doesn’t really do it justice. But, by the same token, so many people make the mistake of making short films way too long. We all know that.’

Aside from some screenings for the wfg and a few privileged others, tiff will mark the premiere of Monday With the Martins.

Dustin Dinoff

*Moon Palace

Director: David Weaver

Imagine a huge Chinese feast. Your friends and family are around you and dishes of piping-hot delicacies are marching out one-by-one in a parade of exotic flavors. However, little do you know your table is bugged, and there is a slacker (trying to prove his ambition) listening, comprehending and composing fortune cookies that address your specific needs and wants. This is the subject of David Weaver’s tiff short Moon Palace.

The 25-minute film was shot in 35mm over five days at a Toronto Chinese banquet hall called Sai Woo. Funded entirely by the Ontario Film Development Corporation Calling Card Program, the project was completed from concept to completion in less than a year.

‘It was the fastest film I’ve ever made,’ says Weaver. ‘In fact, we had to accelerate the post-production schedule a little bit to meet the needs of the film festival.’

Weaver, who wrote the script himself, knew the Calling Card Program would be perfect for his project. ‘I knew about that program because I worked at the ofdc a few years ago,’ he explains.

The writer/director got together with Tashi Bieler, a producer on previous Weaver projects, to get the idea off the ground. ‘[Bieler and I] are friends,’ Weaver begins. ‘We live about a block-and-a-half apart and we wanted to work more together. We both knew about the [Calling Card] program, so it just seemed like a natural fit.’

The Calling Card Program provided the production with $30,000 in cash as well as service deals with companies such as Kodak and Deluxe. Even with the program covering off the entire budget of the short, Weaver is sure he’ll put ‘out some of [his] own money into the film by the end, because [it was] shot in 35mm.’

Weaver got more from his ex-colleagues at the ofdc than just funding.

‘It was actually James Weyman at the ofdc, who’s one of the guys who runs the Calling Card Program, who first suggested [Sai Woo] to me when he read the script. He said he had that restaurant in his mind. So he was actually kind of the location manager and our financier,’ Weaver laughs.

After its festival run, the short will air on Showcase, a partial supporter of the Calling Card Program. Also, Weaver hopes to strike a deal with the AtomFilm website. AtomFilm owns Weaver’s former distributor, Forefront Films.

Overall, the experience was a good one for the writer/director. He sums up: ‘I was really pleased with the cast and we had a great crew and all that. [Plus] we’re going to mix in Dolby. So it’s a pretty sweet little movie.’

Dave Lazar

*New Neighbours

Director: Anita McGee

Anita McGee, the Newfoundland producer/writer/director of New Neighbours, succinctly describes the piece as her ‘six-minute sex film.’ McGee, who has written and directed a couple of other shorts and an hour-long nfb documentary as well as having produced a half-hour tv drama, adapted New Neighbours from her own short story, which appeared in a 1994 edition of Grain, the Saskatchewan Writers Guild magazine.

The film tells the tale of a woman (Maisie Rillie) who has lived alone in the same apartment for many years. Her calm, orderly life is suddenly disrupted when a new couple moves in next door. Before long, the amorous pair’s lovemaking sounds begin to invade her space so much, that objects such as her teapot, the walls of her apartment, and even the words in her book come to life and move in rhythm to the action.

Bravo!fact played a major part in the funding of the comical film. The crew, which included director of photography Robert J. Petrie, was working mostly on deferred salary. ‘I was able to pay them some [money] up front,’ McGee explains. ‘The way Bravo!fact works, you have to show them all your receipts and spend everything first before you get your money. So, when that money came through I was able to pay them the rest.’

Another major contributor was the NewTel/Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council Cultural Innovation Fund. Some money was donated by the city of St. John’s, where the film was shot in May of 1999. The film’s animated sequences were done at the Newfoundland Independent Filmmaker’s Co-operative by Peter Evans, using Adobe After Effects software on a PowerMac G3. The budget came out to approximately $42,000, and the nfb came in with services, helping McGee get a print made.

The Super 16 film has since enjoyed a great deal of success on the festival circuit, taking first prize for best short comedy at the Houston World Festival and ‘honorable mention’ from Canal+ at the Festival International de Films de Femmes in Creteil, France. It has also played at CineVegas in Nevada and Cinequest in San Jose.

When asked about her inspiration for the quirky story, McGee responds, ‘You mean, besides my neighbors?’

Mark Dillon