MONTREAL: The National Film Board is represented by three animated shorts in the official World Film Festival short film competition. Oscar-nominated director Paul Driessen’s 2D or not 2D, coproduced with the Netherlands, is billed as an illustration of the human capacity to spin fiction from fact. Iranian-born director Masoud Rauuf’s Blue Like a Gunshot is a visual poem on harmony and human self-destructiveness, while Nicolas Brault’s Islet/Ilot is an evocative tale about an Inuit fisherman adrift on the ice.

The NFB has also placed six films in the newly launched Documentaries of the World section, including Jose Torrealba’s Open Secrets, about the treatment of homosexuals by the military during and after WWII.

Jason Young’s Animals looks at the remarkable relationships between animals and humans down on the farm, while Barbara Doran’s The Man Who Studies Murder profiles the work of homicide studies pioneer and Newfoundland anthropology professor Elliott Leyton.

Other NFB entries this year include Jeff McKay’s Crapshoot: The Gamble with Our Wastes; Janet Perlman’s wry animation Penguins Behind Bars, a ‘no-holds-barred’ look, penguin style, inside a women’s prison, coproduced with Hulascope Studios; and Oscar winner John Weldon’s Yo, a cautionary tale of dueling yo-yoists and rising violence.

Munro Ferguson’s giant-screen stereoscopic short Falling in Love Again is the NFB’s first animated film using IMAX Sandde technology, and screens at the Paramount theatre.

-www.nfb.ca