Philippe Falardeau shot his eight-minute short Jean Laliberte for a grand total of $40 in one day. Martine Chartrand shot her 10-minute work over four years for $350,000. The former is a comedy about an entrepreneur’s illusions of grandeur; the latter a poetic journey across the history of African peoples in the Americas.

Two short films could hardly be further apart. And yet they will share attention with 25 others during the Perspective Canada shorts program at TIFF. The films selected promise a romp through the Canadian filmmaking world in which the eccentric mixes with the experimental, the drama with high-jinks comedies, painstaking animation with the simplest of reality shooting.

Such esthetic freedom is partly because the festival is not really a market for shorts, explain Perspective Canada programmers Stacey Donnen and Liz Czach. What it does offer is an opportunity for younger filmmakers to have a calling card, while providing the more experienced with an audience for what is perhaps their more experimental work.

With the advent of the digital channels this fall, some of which are actively shopping for short material for their airwaves, some of the TIFF shorts will have an increased chance to come to television screens.

Most importantly, though, the shorts offer filmmakers and viewers alike the chance to sit in a darkened room watching an adaptation of a Franz Kafka story (The Judgment), followed by an absurdist take on an experimental artist (Film(Dzama)), and to then go golfing (The Green). Think of it as the filmic equivalent of tapas. Here’s a selection of these delectable appetizers.

Ame Noire

Director: Martine Chartrand

To create the 10-minute journey through history that is Ame Noire, Quebec director Martine Chartrand painted 14,000 images. Eight thousand of these are in the final animated film.

‘Sometimes I was in the darkroom seven days a week. I would ask myself ‘Est-ce que je me trom pe?’ ‘ Chartrand says of the four-year experience. The result is a film that has won numerous awards around the world, including the prestigious Golden Bear for best short film at the Berlin Film Festival. Funded entirely through the National Film Board’s French Program animation section, it had a budget of approximately $350,000.

The paintings in the film travel over time and over objects, Chartrand explains, to chronicle the history of Africans in the Caribbean and the Americas. ‘It is a poetic traveling across black history.’

Originally an illustrator and a graduate of the painting and drawing program at Concordia University, Chartrand made an award-winning short, TV Tango, in 1992, before heading off to Russia to study with the Oscar-winning Alexander Petrov (The Old Man and the Sea).

The idea for her latest work came from a poster she designed for Black History Month in 1994.

The execution was arduous. For each movement in the film, Chartrand had to erase her previous work and start over, making minute changes each time. She used a finger-painting technique and worked on glass so the camera captured the paintings’ creation. ‘Five seconds is three centuries,’ she says. ‘It was a very artisanal process.’

There are no words in the film. Simply the images, and a music soundtrack by Montreal jazzman Oliver Jones. ‘I wanted the images to speak by themselves,’ Chartrand says. Thirty of the images which remained will be part of an exhibit later this year that will document the making of Ame Noire.

Jean Laliberte

Director: Philippe Falardeau

After winning the Citytv Award for best Canadian first feature at last year’s TIFF for The Left-hand Side of the Fridge, Quebec director Philippe Falardeau returns to the festival with Jean Laliberte, a 10-minute film that cost $40. (Fridge also won the Claude Jutra Award for best first feature at this year’s Genies.)

‘I was a bit embarrassed when it made it in,’ he says of the film’s acceptance by TIFF. ‘I did not submit it as a joke, but I gave it to Liz Czach [one of the Perspective Canada programmers] saying, ‘Take it as candy.’ ‘

Jean Laliberte is based on a small character in Fridge. Falardeau wrote the short script on the bus on a visit his family outside of Montreal. Once he got there, he told them they’d be shooting a movie. The shoot took one day, using two videocassettes and computer editing software and a camera Falardeau already owned.

In the film, the forest in the backyard of the cottage is the landscape on which a megalomaniac entrepreneur plans to build the world’s largest parking lot simply because he can.

‘I am fascinated by the way everything revolves around cars. The priority in urban planning is not quality of life, but whether the car can get there and have a place to park,’ Falardeau says. The film’s tagline, appropriately is, ‘A man, a vision, and a whole lot of concrete.’

The director says the film is proof that technology has revolutionized filmmakers’ ability to get their work done. He is one of the original members of Montreal’s KINO, a group of filmmakers formed in 1999 to encourage (and police) each other to make short films.

‘We challenge each other to make films. With digital, we don’t need to wait for a big project to come up to do our work.’

Romain et Juliette

Director: Frederic Lapierre

Old people are pushed aside, says director Frederic Lapierre, who made his love story Romain et Juliette to counteract what he sees as society’s dismissal of those over a certain age.

The 26-minute film tells the story of the end of a marriage between a couple who have been together for 50 years. In a twist, the woman leaves her husband after one of her old admirers comes back into her life. ‘It’s very sad,’ Lapierre says, ‘but she chooses to live at the end. People think when you are old you’re not living anymore.’

Lapierre’s first short was Tortue-Re-Re, a title that plays on turtle, torture and the singsong of a child’s rhyme. The director is also a writer, who has published a book of short stories (The Bench) and is now writing another.

He wrote the script for Romain et Juliette in 1996, but did not return to it until 1999 when he pitched it to producer Erik Daniel. The two submitted it to Radio-Canada and it was accepted. Telefilm Canada pitched in as well, while technical help came from the NFB. Shot on 35mm, the total budget came to approximately $120,000.

The TIFF screening is the short’s English premiere. It debuted at the Festival international du cinema in Abitibi, Que. last November.

A real love story is at the center of the film. Quebec star Lionel Villeneuve (who passed away in November 2000) starred with his real-life wife of 50 years Helene Loiselle, alongside Gabriel Gascon and Louise Portal. The part was the last one Villeneuve played.

Directing such luminaries of the Quebec screen and stage and shooting in only seven days was an enormous amount of pressure for Lapierre. ‘If it didn’t work, I knew it would be the end of my career,’ he says.

This was a story he had to tell, however. For men of an older generation, including some of the men in his own family, emotions were a problem, he explains. ‘They just did what they thought was best. Romain loves her, but he doesn’t know how to tell her.’

He defends the film’s ending as a respectful nod to the audience. ‘I didn’t want a happy ending at any price. People have appreciated the honesty of the work.’

Lip Service

Director: Ann-Marie Fleming

TIFF veteran Ann-Marie Fleming wrote the script for what became her 12th short in the Toronto festival while on an artist’s residency in Germany in 1997. She was in contact with almost no one during her time there and thought back to an incident that happened while she was living in Toronto years ago.

The remains of a Jane Doe in her mid-thirties were discovered when a car dealership was torn down. The woman had disappeared sometime in the fifties but no one had ever reported her missing. ‘Post-war it must have been very easy to disappear,’ Fleming speculates. ‘I was in Germany by myself and started to think about that.’

The 45-minute Lip Service follows a lipless detective as she tracks the case of a missing woman. Single, the detective increasingly begins to question her own life, drawing parallels between her own solitary existence and the messy and entangled relationships in the life of the woman she is searching for.

Lip Service premiered earlier this summer at the Women Make Waves festival in Taipei. It’s as much about the pitfalls of life as about a particular female grappling with those pitfalls.

‘If you don’t progress along the lines mapped out for you, it’s easier to get lost. We all know people like that, for whom the potential for things to get better is fading,’ Fleming says.

Lip Service received funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and Fleming also funded it through Global Mechanic, the commercial and animation house she runs with partner Bruce Alcock, for a total of about $80,000. It was shot on DV over the course of a year and every frame was artworked in Photoshop to achieve a surreal, painted effect. Each of the final images in the film is composed of layers, each bit both obscuring and revealing, a mirror to Fleming’s theme.

‘I wanted to look at the idea of identity and how we construct ourselves,’ she says. While much of the film is a lyrical journey, it also includes statistical information on the real-life cases of the thousands of people who do go missing every year and are never found.

Scenes D’Enfants

Director: Lara Fitzgerald

It’s been a while since director Lara Fitzgerald attended NYU’s six-week summer film school and made what she calls five ‘very bad short films.’

From that unconventional film training, however, Fitzgerald went on to win the best director prize at Hot Docs ’98 as well as the Telefilm Canada award for best Canadian doc for Remembering Memory. She followed that up with the NFB doc Fragments of Lost History, about a company that competed with the Hudson’s Bay Company early in the 20th century. Scenes d’Enfants (Scenes from Childhood) is her second short, on the heels of a Bravo!FACT-funded adaptation of The Lady of Chalot. (Fitzgerald was raised in English and French and works in both languages.)

The new 10-minute film has a deceptively simple structure but further investigates the theme of memory. Two twins come upon a woman (Marie-Josee Lefebvre) who has had a bicycle accident. With the young girls standing by, the woman returns in her mind to three memories from her childhood. ‘I wanted to look at what is the difference between memory and imagination…how we create fictions in our minds and the distance we have from our past,’ Fitzgerald says.

Luck played a part in the technique used to shoot the 35mm film. The short was filmed through giant windows Fitzgerald found in the garbage in Toronto’s Annex area. Her partner then painted and scratched the windows. The final images appear stained by time, as if they have been drawn from the dusty archives of the mind.

Fitzgerald’s own memories influenced the film. ‘My mother used to play Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood, so the idea came from that.’

The NFB’s French Program, the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council all contributed to the film’s $38,000 budget.

Touch

Director: Jeremy Podeswa

‘When I was younger, you made shorts because that’s all you could make. Now you make them because you really want to,’ says director Jeremy Podeswa of his latest TIFF offering.

Coming after last year’s 24FPS, part of the fest’s five-minute commissioned Prelude program, Touch is adapted from a Patrick Roscoe short story. On one level, the story is about how a boy copes with the effects of having been held captive for many years. (The cast includes Brendan Fletcher, Linda Griffiths and Daniel MacIvor.) On a metaphorical level, Podeswa explains, the story is about the nature of abuse and desire. ‘I did not want people to be distracted by the sensational material. It’s delicate material to be used as a metaphor.’

With no sync dialogue, an abstract use of sound and film manipulation, Podeswa heightened the sense that the narrative is one level removed from reality. The director printed reversal film as a negative, then made a print from that negative. ‘It gives you a different texture,’ he explains.

At 25 minutes, Touch was shot over three days last summer and made for $25,000, with funds from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council, as well as support from Fearless Studios and Casablanca Sound. ‘It’s very interesting for someone like me, at mid-career, who has a lot of resources, to make shorts,’ Podeswa says. ‘It’s a chance to do what you can’t do in a feature.’

I Shout Love

Director: Sarah Polley

Director and actor Sarah Polley says her short I Shout Love may be romantic in nature but it’s inspired by universal themes. ‘What I admire in people is the willingness to fight for something you’re not going to win. It’s even more noble if you’re not going to win but you fight anyway.’

The 40-minute film (the director’s second short) focuses on the last 24 hours of a relationship. Knowing that the man is going to leave her, the woman asks for another day. ‘She has to have some completion, to say goodbye,’ Polley explains.

Tragic in plot but comedic in execution, the film is partly shot on digital, with the female character (Kristen Thomson) documenting her story with a DV camera. (The rest of the film is on 35mm.) ‘I have spent much of my life in front of the camera, so I am interested in how the camera is always an observer in the room,’ Polley explains. The technique was aimed at distancing the story from the viewer, but in the end, made the couple’s story more immediate. ‘Putting the camera in the actor’s hand made it raw,’ Polley says.

The film was a year and a half in the making and was workshopped by Thomson and lead actor Matthew Ferguson before it was shot this June.

A Fresh Start

Director: Jason Buxton

Nothing explicitly disturbing or violent happens in A Fresh Start, but some audiences still feel they should not be watching what they’re watching, says A Fresh Start director Jason Buxton. The film is a subtle look at the darker edges of family dynamics, and for viewers who pick up on that theme, the experience can be unsettling.

The 15-minute short is structured in a series of scenes. A couple and their children prepare to move to another town. While they may wish to leave their old selves behind, the move sharpens years of contained hostility and frustration between the parents. ‘The underlying implication is that these people don’t feel good about themselves,’ Buxton says.

Viewers’ unease may be partly due to the environment Buxton wanted to create. The camera moves organically with the characters. ‘You feel you are watching life itself. The camera movement is motivated only by what the characters are doing,’ he says. Inspired in part by autobiographical material, the film is particularly harrowing in its depiction of the impact of the hostility on the family’s children.

This is the first short from the graduate of Simon Fraser University and was financed primarily with his earnings as a camera assistant, as well as help from the NFB and the Atlantic Filmmaker’s Co-Operative. While shooting took place over the course of eight days – two weekends and another few days for an epilogue scene – the whole process took a year and a half. Buxton worked throughout to come up with the $30,000 cost of the film.