Film reviews: From claustrophobic horror to kayaking calamity, VSFF delivers big impact with small format
At the 15th annual event, here are six titles festival director Duncan Carr calls “a full experience in the briefest amount of time”
Clockwise from top left: “The Sorrow”, “One Day This Kid”, and “Have I Swallowed Your Dreams”.
The Vancouver Short Film Festival runs from June 13 to 15 at SFU Woodward’s Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
SOME SHORT FILMS LIVE with you forever. There’s an entire generation of Canadians who will fall into gauzy reverie if you mention “The Red Balloon”. Millions across the globe were traumatized by “La cabina”. For Vancouver Short Film Festival director Duncan Carr, it’s a 26-minute drama about a single mom called “Wasp”.
“It was just soaked in perspective,” he tells Stir. “Really well done. You were dropped into this entire world, where you experienced a day or two in this person’s life, and that was it. A great short film will have an arc. It’ll give you a full experience in the briefest amount of time.”
Made in 2003, “Wasp” was an early effort by Andrea Arnold, who would go on to make the acclaimed features Fish Tank and American Honey. Like most filmmakers, she honed her skills in a format where craft is reduced to its very essentials.
Carr notes that short film might not enjoy the “clout and reverence” reserved for feature film, but that’s a commercial issue. Anyone attending the 15th annual Vancouver Short Film Festival will experience, to paraphrase the festival’s own PR, the big impact produced by such a small format. And as Hollywood appears to die right before our eyes, taking Hollywood North with it, it’s encouraging to find Canadian and local short film in such robust good health.
“There are a lot of Canadian filmmakers out there dropping thousands of dollars to make a story, and then spending hundreds of hours putting them together and putting them out there,” says Carr, who was recently promoted to festival director after joining the team in 2019.
He reports that VSFF is averaging roughly 400 submissions a year, which the selection committee winnows down to about 50. This year’s crop includes narrative and documentary shorts, along with animation, where Carr says he finds the most “boundary-pushing” work. But any of these titles will dazzle the viewer with their invention, fluency, and the marriage of technique with economy.
Here are six we liked:
“Have I Swallowed Your Dreams”
Carr praises its “nice, chewy, emotionally charged content,” and he’s not wrong. This animated piece explores the inner lives of a mother and her daughter as they sit silently across from each other, revealing guilt, recrimination, and finally wisdom and acceptance, all inside six fluid, colour-drenched minutes. Clara Chan’s film is perhaps a defining title in the Let Mama Go program, which is built around “complicated mother-daughter relationships”.
“One Day This Kid”
An entire life is contained inside Alexander Farah’s masterful, Vancouver-made drama, wherein an Iranian family hurtles toward a fatal, generational collision between the old world and the new. Shot, cut, and performed to perfection, it resolves after 17 minutes with an emotional wallop that will doubtless prompt theatre-wide paroxysms of tears when it screens, with devilish programming acumen, on Father’s Day.
“HATCH”
Also from Vancouver and no less devastating, although for very different reasons, “HATCH” puts us in the company of Afghan refugees forced to hide inside a moving tanker. Predictably the ship is apprehended by authorities, but the horrors of the experience have already been evoked through little more than a single claustrophobic set and the film’s performances. Like the rest of the Everything Really Matters program, which leans toward heavier subject matter, “HATCH” is a triumph of frugal storytelling. You’re left wondering how on earth they did it.
“The Sorrow”
Vancouver acting legend Mel Tuck takes a quasi-silent role in Thomas Affolter’s politically minded horror story, in which a live-in nurse is accosted by restless spirits as she cares for a dying military man. The film succeeds in making a character out of its old dark house, and the special effects, when they arrive, are genuinely unsettling. But the biggest achievement here is the use of sound, principally when an old tape recording conjures the discomfiting memory of the film’s most banal but terrifying monster.
Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll (left) and Allie Dunbar in “Clementine”.
“Clementine”
It would be impossible to over-praise Beth Evans’s deceptively light film, which puts Allie Dunbar’s considerable comic chops (she also wrote the screenplay) inside a flip construct that ends with a deadly serious payoff. It’s to the credit of both director and star—not to mention Rodrigo Fernandez-Stoll as Clementine’s “friend”, Donnie—that the film can negotiate its two extreme poles without breaking a sweat. As the laughs fade, we’re left with, amazingly, a blunt critique of current healthcare practices.
Two goofballs decide to kayak the 150 kilometres from Cougar Creek to Tofino along the west coast of Vancouver Island. Disaster ensues, caught in supremely terrifying detail by the duo’s GoPros. “Beyond the Salish” is hair-raising, but it also rides the thin line between real-life horror and real-life comedy, thanks to the endearing team of Richard Chen and William Chong, who don’t hesitate to call out their own stupidity. Honestly, I hope they take cameras on their next adventure into life-threatening calamity. 
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