You may not be able to make a living off short films, but filmmakers traditionally use them to springboard into long form and to experiment with style and content. And while still falling behind Europe in terms of appreciating and providing a market for short films, Canada is beginning to recognize them as a unique and valuable art form.

At TIFF 2000, shorts in the 25th anniversary Preludes series by filmmakers including David Cronenberg and Don McKellar ‘raised the profile of short films in this country,’ says Katherine Emslie, director of film and television production at the Canadian Film Centre. ‘And the Worldwide Short Film Festival [in Toronto] is also growing every year.’

Because short films do not necessarily need a distributor or have a funding agency controlling the content, they ‘are one of the forms for filmmakers to totally express themselves,’ says Emslie. ‘We don’t see short films solely as calling cards for features. We see short films very much as a storytelling art form that in and of itself is just as important and just as difficult as features.’

Short films can also be difficult to make because there isn’t much of a market for them in Canada and they depend almost solely on grants. Arts council grants like the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council are a key funding base for short films. There are also programs specifically targeted to the short film, such as the Kick Start program in B.C., funded by Telefilm West, the DGC West Coast district and British Columbia Film, and the Al Waxman Calling Card Program, administered by the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

Toronto-based Nathan Morlando’s first film, Countdown, about a bike courier who dreams of being an action-film star, was funded through the Al Waxman Calling Card Program and screens at TIFF this year.

Three shorts from the CFC are also screening at this year’s festival: Evelyn: the Cutest Evil Dead Girl from Brad Peyton, a dark comedy about a dead girl; Short Hymn_Silent War 03 from Charles Officer, a drama about the responses of four African-Canadian women to the death of two young men killed in gun violence; and Straight in the Face from Peter Demas, about a gay couple who do not believe their daughter’s boyfriend is straight.

But while Canada is increasingly fostering the making and showcasing of short films, the European market continues to be more responsive to them. ‘In Europe there is a longer legacy of recognizing the importance of short films and they are screened [more regularly],’ says Perspective Canada programmer Liz Czach. ‘Experimental film is still alive and well in Europe.’

In addition to a more developed appreciation for shorts, European commissioning editors also buy more Canadian than Canada. ‘My films get sold to European television stations far more than they get sold here,’ says Chris Hinton, whose animated National Film Board short Flux is screening at this year’s festival. His short A Nice Day in the Country has been well received across Europe through New York-based distributor Italfilms.

The only other animated Canadian short at TIFF 2002 is Jesse Rosensweet’s The Stone of Folly, an NFB stop-action animation which shared the Prix du Jury for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

Short films can find a home on Canadian broadcasters like Showcase, Moviola, W Network, The Movie Network, Bravo! and CBC. Short documentaries, in particular, sell well to Canadian broadcasters, and among the shorts submissions to TIFF this year, Czach says she noticed an increased number of documentary entries in the short film category. This year five of the 29 shorts are documentaries and last year only one of 27 shorts was a doc.

Broadcast timeslots have streamlined the length of short documentaries. ‘You don’t see many documentaries that are an odd length,’ says Czach. ‘Five or 10 years ago you would have documentaries of all kinds of lengths, but now it’s geared so much toward television that they’re either half or full hours.’

The problem is it forces stories to be told within a set time frame rather than letting the nature of the story determine the time of the film, which has been the tradition in short film.

Another trend emerging in short-film production is that the traditional format for shorts, 16mm, is on its way out, being replaced by either 35mm or digital. Since TIFF started providing a forum for screening digital films three years ago, the number of 16mm entries has steadily declined. Among the 29 shorts screening in TIFF’s Perspective Canada program, 18 were shot on 35mm, 10 on digital and only one on 16mm.

‘I was struck by the way that 16mm is disappearing,’ says Czach. ‘There are people moving up to 35mm and there are also filmmakers who are shooting on film but finishing on digital.’ Examples of the latter in this year’s festival include Ontario-based Cliff Caines’ Die Mutter, and from Vancouver, Byron Lamarque’s Once Upon a Time on the Beach. Finishing a film digitally is less expensive than printing to film and can produce superior sound to 16mm.