PROGRAMME 1
Sep 11, 9:30pm, Bader; Sep 12, 1pm, AGO.
The clear standout here is former EYE WEEKLY cover boy Chris Landreth’s The Spine, a vivid CGI deconstruction of co-dependency with a devastating money shot scored to Joe Cocker’s cover of “Bird on a Wire.” Min Sook Lee’s documentary My Toxic Baby is an eco-horror treatise with a very personal perspective: the filmmaker’s investigation of the chemical content of baby products is heightened by the fact that she had a child of her own before rolling (digital) camera.
PROGRAMME 2
Sep 12, 4pm, Bader; Sep 13, 1:15pm, AGO.
Ryerson grad Kazik Radwanski improves on his impressive TIFF 08 short Princess Margaret Blvd with Out in that Deep Blue Sea, using similarly intimate aesthetics to render the experiences of a real estate salesman paralyzed by anxiety. Radwanski’s knack for destabilizing compositions and judiciously parcelled out narrative marks him as an exciting new talent. Another young filmmaker to watch is be Ryan Mullins, whose documentary Volta surveys the remains of a Ghana movie house to poetic effect.
PROGRAMME 3
Sep 13, 9pm, Sep 14, 3pm; Sep 18, 7pm; all screenings AGO.
An example of truth in advertising, Peter Wellington’s Pointless Film depicts a craigslist transaction gone slightly wrong to very little purpose whatsoever — except that the tetchy back-and-forth about how much to pay for a slightly used futon is really quite funny. There’s more metaphorical heft to Cordell Barker’s springy animated comedy Runaway, which offers an analysis of bailout-era economics via the demented trajectory of a class-segregated railway train.
PROGRAMME 4
Sep 14, 6pm & Sep 15, 3pm, AGO.
Jamie Travis transcends the Patterns trilogy with the ambitious, technically adroit psychodrama The Armoire, about a preteen boy reeling after the sudden disappearance of his best friend. Travis’ eye for elegantly creepy imagery remains sharp as ever, but this time out, the tableaux feel imbued with a meaning beyond the filmmaker’s own headspace. Even more plangent (and just as well-made) is Anne Emond’s Naissances, which portrays the deceptive but deeply felt rest-stop commiseration between a pair of similarly wounded souls.
PROGRAMME 5
Sep 15, 7:15pm, Bader; Sep 16, 4pm, AGO.
Randall Okita’s TIFF 08 debut Machine with Wishbone showcased miraculous miniature Rube Goldbergs — fish in a barrel features a more menacing contraption. If there is perhaps something too studied about the obliqueness of Okita’s imagery — a depressed young man in a bathtub; a massive crow; a watery wraith — there’s no doubt that the director has a facility for tactility. The aesthetics of Dylan Reibling’s Record are comparatively low-rent, but its slow-burn comic scenario, set at a Saturday-afternoon flea market, is built around a lovely idea: Proust’s madeleine as a piece of music. (It also features a brief soundtrack cut by EYE WEEKLY house band The Two Koreas.)
SHORTS WITH FEATURES
An “ever hear the one about…?” set-up gets a thoughtful follow-through in Dev Khanna’s A Hindu’s Indictment of Heaven, which makes good on its title with a minimum of proselytizing and a beautifully realized final image. (Screens with Machotaildrop.) There is no money shot in Igor Drljaca’s On a Lonely Drive, and the film is more unsettling for it — this open-ended account of a little boy who stows away in his parents’ car reveals itself as an apt and possibly tragic metaphor for how bickering parents can easily lose sight of that which is right under their nose. (Screens with Passenger Side.)