Last but not least in our preview of Sundance ’09 are the short films. Talk about the short end of the stick. It makes one wonder why anyone bothers making them. So it makes sense to ask Doug Karr why he made Ten for Grandpa, one of six shorts screening at the festival.

‘I’ve been making films for 11 years and what I realized halfway into my career is that I didn’t want to rush it,’ he says. ‘I wanted to learn the craft and the all the facets of filmmaking before calling myself a director, to make sure the stories were of a caliber worth telling and to create images that were of the level of what I saw in my mind. It’s a fantastic way to explore the craft.’

As ambitious as it is slick — it has nine speaking parts in its seven minutes — the film features David Alpay (Ararat, The Tudors) as a narrator posing questions to the ghost of his grandfather, a mythological being whose Zelig-like existence seems to have touched every historical marker.

‘It’s insane,’ agrees Karr, before admitting to what he terms an ‘ambition issue.’ He recounts a meeting with a commissioning editor at the CBC who told him he was very ambitious. When he thanked her, she replied, ‘That’s not necessarily a compliment.’

Karr’s producing partner Edward Boyce likens the short filmmaking process to ‘building a car, driving it a mile and then taking it apart.’ Painful, yes, but it allows everyone working on the film to work at a level they aspire towards. ‘Everyone is going for broke because the stakes are not so high that you can ruin your reputation. It’s a great tool for growth.’

Karr and Boyce are both from Nova Scotia and now run a small New York City-based production company called Chop Wood Carry Water. The name harkens back to Canada’s history as hewers of wood and drawers of water, but it comes from a Zen parable.

Says Boyce: ‘Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. It’s all about the craft. Keep doing the craft.’

As for their short-format peers, Denis Villeneuve’s Next Floor needs no introduction, having won the best short film prize at International Critics’ Week at Cannes.

The others are: Lyndon Casey’s Captain Coulier (Space Explorer), produced by David Fradkin and Anthony James Gallagher; Cattle Call, written, directed and produced by Matthew Rankin and Mike Maryniuk; The Real Place, directed by Cam Christiansen, written by Blake Brooker and produced by Bonnie Thompson and David Christensen through the National Film Board; and Treevenge, directed by Jason Eisener, and written and produced by Rob Cotterill. Treevenge is clearly a category killer: it has won audience awards at three horror film festivals.