TIFF GUIDE

SHORT CUTS CANADA

Inspired by the brevity of the films on offer, ADAM NAYMAN picks the best in TIFF's homegrown short film programs. See www.tiff07.ca for complete program lists.

Program 1: Deco Dawson's The Last Moment runs through various grimy scenarios, the common denominators being a perplexed, dishevelled hero and a girlfriend who tends to wind up dead in his bathtub. Guy Maddin disciple Dawson's formal control is superb, suffusing each scene with a different hard-boiled movie style ('40s film noir, contemporary scuzz melodrama) while retaining a unique symbolic continuity. At 29 minutes, The Last Moment is the longest short at TIFF, but it's compelling for its duration. The programme's other Winnipeg-made entry, Neil and Cathy McInnes' Automoto, is comparatively slight, but impressive on its own modest terms. It's a stop-motion silent comedy about a wooden factory worker warding off very human feelings of loss and loneliness.
Sep 7, 8pm, and Sep 8, 4:45pm, ROM.

Program 2: The praise chorus for Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis' Cannes-feted short Madame Tutli-Putli is already deafening, and it should be: its stop-motion rendering of a woman riding the rails has been adorned with some subtly wondrous digital flourishes. It's vivid, scary and inscrutable – a brief, shivery dream of short-form cinema. The same description applies to Britt Randle's Dada Dum, a hallucinatory black-and-white piece centring on – or more properly, orbiting around – a glazed-eyed and gravity-defying young lady.
Sep 13, 7:45pm, ROM; Sep 14, 3:30pm, Cumberland 3.

Program 3: Another TIFF, another Adam 'n' Dave short. Messrs Brodie and Derewlany aren't in top form with the geeky mock-doc Knights of Atomikaron, but there's something to be said for watching people attempting medieval-style jousting atop Segway steeds. They should also be lauded for introducing us to the concept of a “digital wolf.” First-timer Dev Khanna contributes a sharp treatment of Terry Southern's previously unproduced script Plums and Prunes, a filial Lolita tale shot through with a strain of male self-loathing.
Sep 12, 9:45pm, and Sep 13, noon, Cumberland 3.

Program 4: The lazily strummed song that forms the basis of Cam Christiansen's motion-capture animation I Have Seen the Future is a true ear-burrower, though at first it just seems aimless. The film is a first-person account of musician Kris Demeanor being menaced by some mouthy kids on a tennis court in Calgary. Its unrhymed ramble quickly grows catchy, then unexpectedly funny, and then even moving as it parses male experience. Boys-will-be-boys themes also permeate Jonathan Van Tulleken's Bumblebee, albeit in a darker way – the film is obvious but still powerful, its “gotcha” moment perfectly played.
Sep 10, 6pm, and Sep 11, 4pm, Cumberland 3.

Program 5: The Colony starts as one kind of ugly and ends as another – and that isn't a put-down. Jeff Barnaby's slow-boiling piece begins with an on-the-job chat between two loggers – one European-Canadian, one Aboriginal-Canadian – and then proceeds to unravel the latter's terrifying personal life: attitudes have consequences. It wouldn't be fair to the film to reveal how freaky stuff gets – suffice it to say that Barnaby understands that the best effects (dramatic and otherwise) are the ones you save till you need them. The ending is also everything for Eduardo Menz's Fracas, which overlays the audio of a spelling bee on yearbook photos of kids who might be participants. Its solution is haunting.
Sep 11, 9:45pm and Sep 12, 3:45pm, Cumberland 3.

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