The Future of Film Showcase: A gem on CBC Gem is a free fest of films that count in small amounts
By Liam Lacey
For a film festival programmer, It’s a sweet deal when the national broadcaster, CBC, via its free app, Gem, makes your event available to a national audience.
That’s what’s happening with the Future of Film Showcase (July 9-22.) The Toronto-based short film festival, now in its eighth year, is run by director-producer Eric Bizzarri and producer Shant Joshi (Porcupine Lake), who started the festival when they were students at York University in 2014.
An animated scene from Sophie and Jacob
Last year, when COVID shut down the one-day festival, usually held at Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre, they successfully pitched CBC to carry it,
The entire festival consists of 11 films, which you can watch in a single sitting. The submission guidelines are that they must be from Canadian filmmakers who are 40 or under (or older, if they’re in a post-secondary school).
And the festival includes a minimum of 50 percent BIPOC filmmakers, so it checks several boxes for the CBC mandate — Canadian, young and diverse.
These films generally fall into three overlapping categories: Short dramas, formal experiments, and identity-themed character studies. The dramas include Anya Chirkova’s lyrical summer love story, Flower Boy, in which a young musician, Nav (Maziyar Khatam) meets a magical girl, Sarah (Andrea Pavlovic) who is off to art school in Ottawa, leaving Nav to face a future working at a laser tag arcade.
Rebeccah Love’s Parlour Palm resembles a theatrical two-hander, about a couple (
Tyson Coady and Sarah Swire), that takes place in two rooms in an old-fashioned wainscotted home. He’s intent on making partner at his firm and maybe starting a family. She’s unemployed, and while spending her days on the web, spirals into a bipolar mental health crisis about the impending climate disaster, while faithfully watering her potted palm.
Bruna Arbex’s This is a Period Piece, is an action-packed 10-minute comedy horror-spoof about menstruation phobia, with 13-year-old, Riley (Matreya Scarrwener) getting her first period, leading to bloody confrontations and civic panic.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
The experimental films are 16-millimetre artisanal work, emphasizing flickering surfaces and uneasy moods. Elian Mikkola’s claustrophobic Aries, the most COVID-related film here, is a three-minute gaze through obscured portions of a static window frame. Nisha Platzer’s faintly elegiac tulips are my father’s favourite flower, has flashes of film artifacts, tinting, and blurry images of walking feet, set to muffled, scronky score. Qiuli’s Wu’s foreboding Sunken Cave and a Migrating Bird has a shadow of a narrative about a brother and sister exploring a dilapidated house and a zoo, possibly connected to a ghost story.
Films about racial and gender identity include Azis Zoromba’s Faraway, a slow-burn study of loneliness and alienation, as a young gay Arab man in Montreal tries to contact his ill mother over a four-year period. In Callahan Bracken’s animated three-minute My Head Aches When I Look Too Long, a gay teen-age boy takes a break from internet porn and feels guilty about plucked flowers. Kourtney Jackson’s short documentary, Wash Day, follows three young Black women, as they wash their hair and talk about body image and beauty, the contrary meanings of pride as both vanity and self-care.
Two other films fall in the line-up, which includes elements of experiment and identity, but might be described as about the tricky business of communal memory.
Kajanaqtug, by Ella Morton, shoots stark arctic landscapes with processed Super 8 mm film, in a way that evokes spattered abstract art canvases, accompanied by voice-over memories and accounts of mythology from Inuit elder Naulaq LeDrew. LeDrew says that in 1967, the RCMP deliberately slaughtered thousands of huskies to force Inuit out of their traditional way of life, a claim that has been dismissed by an Inuit commission which released a report on the long-held belief in 2010
There are similar issues with Sophie and Jacob, an accomplished (mostly) animated film by teen-aged director and animator Max Shoham, about his great grandparents, who apparently found love on a ship while fleeing Nazi-occupied Romania. Their story is told through voice-over letters to their parents, connecting their escape to the new land with the Biblical account of Exodus. The family story seems quite specific, including a family tree, showing the director’s lineage to Sophie and Jacob.
What’s literally true is fuzzy. One apparent glitch is a repeated scene of an animated log of a distress call from the ship: the first time it’s in 1940, the second time the date is listed as 1939. Sophie and Jacob’s story builds to a catastrophic torpedo attack that sinks the ship. Yet, if you check the Second World War history of ships from Nazi-era Romania to Palestine carrying Jewish refugees, the only similar catastrophe is that of the Struma. That ship was sunk in February 1942 by a Russian torpedo, killing almost 800 people, with just one survivor, 19-year-old David Stoliar.
What filmmakers, emerging or established, owe to historical truth is an endless debate. But it’s useful to be reminded that memory, while a great editor, is not a particularly reliable recorder.
The Future Film Showcase is available on the CBC Gem app from July 9-22.