Short Cuts Programme 1 (Various)

TIFF screens a series of short film programmes each year, featuring about half a dozen or so shorts at a time.

I haven't been to a "Short Cuts" programme in a few years and decided that this would be the year to address that. Short Cuts #1 included eight films from Canada and the rest of the world, leading off with a short called "Nimic" by the director Yorgos Lanthimos (the director of "The Favourite", "Killing of a Sacred Deer" and others). It also had star power as the lead was played by Matt Dillon.

Although it was clearly a film by him, I don't think it was the best of this program, feeling a little bit like a slight "Twilight Zone" episode.

Many of the films dealt with death and specifically how a death affects the living. Of those films, Siyou Tan's "Hello Ahma" was a lovely little film on the impact of a grandmother's passing on a young Chinese girl and how she learns to say goodbye.

The two most visually striking films were Sylvain Cruiziat's "The Raft", a piece on the collision of the European migration crisis and high art, and Brandon Cronenberg's "Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences As They Come to You" (probably the longest title of the entire festival. In both cases, though, the endings needed to be stronger to meet the promise of the set-up. I found this to be the case in particular with "The Raft". It's a powerful short, but the violence which occurs at the end and how it was applied didn't ring true with me.

Closing the programme was Sverre Fredriksen's "Human Nature", the only animated and comic film of the show. It was very short (probably only a couple of minutes), but it laid out the premise and delivered its punchlines very well.