Toronto International Film Festival 2018: 10 Must-See Short Films

One of the hidden gems of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Short Cuts programme, functions as a festival of its own: dozens of short films screen throughout, with programmers Jason Anderson and Lisa Haller having the monumental task of selecting the shorts and then compiling them into smaller programmes grouped around a theme of some sort. Or to be more reductive: it’s like making a playlist but with much higher stakes.

I started exploring the Short Cuts lineup several years ago, and found it was full of the sense of discovery that drew me to a festival like TIFF in the first place. Great short films can pack as much of a punch as great feature films, and given the different landscape around distributing shorts, the opportunity to access them can be fleeting. Below are 10 short films playing at Toronto International Film Festival this year that are worth seeing and/or seeking out, whether you’re at the festival or not.

All Inclusive (Corina Schwingruber Ilić)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 6

Corina Schwingruber Ilić’s documentary sets its sights on a massive cruise ship travelling the high seas, using precise framing and a focus on the awkward comedy of social interaction to make a surreal collection of luxurious grotesqueries. The ship itself looks like some gargantuan beast, filled with apartments and amenities stacked on top of each other in a massive pile of excess.

Ilić and cinematographer Nikola Ilić (whose work here recalls films by Ulrich Seidl and Ruben Ostlund) put an emphasis on the negative space of the ocean and horizon around the cruise, isolating the lavish elements of society we’re used to in order to heighten how bizarre these manufactured pieces of opulence truly are.

Brotherhood (Meryam Joobeur)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 2

In Tunisia, a family finds a surprise at their doorstep: their estranged, eldest son, who left them to go fight in Syria and now returns with his (very) young, pregnant wife. It’s an awkward family reunion, especially for the father Mohamed, who still can’t forgive his son’s decision to fight in the war.

Writer/director Meryam Joobeur has just over 20 minutes to communicate the complex emotional history running through this family unit, which she pulls off by having her film unfold largely in close-ups, letting the weathered faces and conflicted glances of her characters fill out the backstory. The 4×3 framing also lets these faces, and the emotional turmoil underneath them, take up the screen entirely.

Joobeur, who’s already developing Brotherhood into a feature-length film, makes a big mark here, along with cinematographer Vincent Gonneville, whose work is nothing short of spectacular.

The Fall (Boris Labbé)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 4

The Fall is a terrifying short film, but not in a conventional sense. This is a kind of horror that cuts to the soul, and gets under the skin in a way that’s hard to get rid of. Its imagery disturbs in its abstract brutality, its ability to conjure up chaos and suffering on a scale that feels wrong in every fiber of one’s being.

Director Boris Labbé created thousands of drawings with Indian ink and watercolours to portray the creation of heaven and hell, and the results are like throwing Bosch, Bruegel, and Bacon into a blender while Penderecki plays in the background (Daniele Ghisi‘s score could stand on its own as a nerve-shattering masterwork).

This is guttural horror, best to be experienced rather than told about. This isn’t just the best short film of the year; it might just be the scariest film of this decade.

Fauve (Jeremy Comte)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 7

On a storytelling level, Fauve benefits from its simplicity, taking the story of the boy who cried wolf and transplanting it to a tale of two young boys playing pranks on each other in the woods. The competitiveness between the boys gets more intense, some quicksand gets involved, and in a matter of seconds the stakes skyrocket.

While the story is simple, the craftsmanship is anything but, with Jeremy Comte (doing triple duty as writer, director, and editor) showing an assuredness in his filmmaking that even most feature-length debuts seem to lack. Fauve is yet another example of how even the most familiar stories can work wonders with the right amount of skill.

Good Boy (Fantavious Fritz)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 4

Looks can be deceiving, like it is with Fantavious Fritz’s Good Boy. It starts with a K9 officer (Pat Phillips) getting a new dog as his partner, and at first it seems like this could be a light-hearted story between a cop and his dog. But Fritz hones in on the training sessions, creating a montage centered around teaching the dog to attack, which gets juxtaposed with the officer and his dog giving a presentation to grade schoolers.

The way Fritz gradually expands the scale of his short into an examination on the normalization of violence is impressive, and the muted colours of Bobby Shore’s 35mm cinematography make perfect sense by the end, giving a sinister vibe to a relationship that can go from charming to deadly in the blink of an eye.

Guaxuma (Nara Normande)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 3

Nara Normande’s autobiographical animated short tells the tragic story of her friendship with Tayra, who she grew up with on Guaxuma beach in Brazil. Normande reminisces about her time with Tarya by using several stop motion techniques, all of which use sand as the primary method to create images.

It’s not just that Normande and her team of animators create a series of stunning and meticulously crafted images that makes Guaxuma work so well; it’s the act of painting with sand to convey both the personal aspect of the story and drive home the themes of memory and loss throughout. It’s one of the more emotionally resonant shorts in this year’s programme.

A New Year (George Sikharulidze)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 3

A father (Giorgi Bandzeladze) decides to join a monastery, leaving his wife (Eka Demetradze, terrific) and teenage son (Demetre Gratiashvili) behind for good in George Sikharulidze’s compelling look at a family torn apart by one’s devotion.

Instead of making this just a story about a father abandoning his family, Sikharulidze complicates matters with religion, showing the family’s patriarch abandoning one calling for another, supposedly higher one. It’s a collision between the selfish and the selfless, with a keen, empathetic eye on the people forced to take the brunt of the damage.

Norman Norman (Sophy Romvari)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 3

First off, I need to give full disclosure: I’m friends with Norman Norman director Sophy Romvari (and, I like to think, friends with Norman as well). And I hope that any perceived bias in me highlighting her film here doesn’t take away from how enjoyable Norman Norman is, which focuses on a dog owner (Romvari) researching the possibility of cloning her 16-year-old Shih Tzu Norman.

Romvari keeps the camera fixed on Norman throughout, never filming her own face and only cutting away to show the various videos and websites she comes across in her research. It’s a basic set up with almost no direct exposition, but by using her own story, Romvari builds a rich, fully developed narrative, bridging the gulf between denial and acceptance in a mere seven minutes.

Umbra (Saeed Jafarian)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 1

Probably the most intriguing short in this year’s programme, Saeed Jafarian’s Umbra works best in the dreamlike atmosphere it conjures. A woman (Mahsa Alafar) comes out of the shower to find her lover missing, prompting her to go out on the streets at night to find him. She leaves her guarded neighborhood only to find the nightwatchman missing from his post, and seemingly no one around except for a figure watching her from afar.

The thrill of Umbra is that, for most of its runtime, it’s impossible to figure out where it will go, and Jafarian wraps things up in a way that’s subdued enough to keep its spell unbroken. While the conclusion might not satisfy those expecting a more conventional ending, the film’s ruminations on independence and freedom linger.

Viktoria (Brúsi Ólason)

Playing in Short Cuts Programme 5

Inspired by his own mother, Brúsi Ólason’s Viktoria follows a farmer (Ingrid Jónsdóttir) in her 60s as she comes to realize her growing irrelevance in the world. After her farmhand abruptly leaves, she finds herself alone with no friends, her only family on the other side of the world, and no offers for help except from people wanting her to sell the farm.

Jónsdóttir is the highlight, but the film wouldn’t work nearly as well if it weren’t for Ólason’s sense of character and place, with each scene built around the protagonist’s growing acceptance of her new place in life. Its ending – a small respite from the film’s melancholy mood – acts as a pleasant grace note.

Toronto International  Film Festival takes place between 6 – 16 September 2018.