RIFFA Day 2: More Short Films and a Couple Documentaries

Documentarian and professional animal trainer Andrew Simpson ...and me  (photo credit: Morgan Beaudry)

       I saw eight films yesterday! Of wildly different types and genres too. Most were shorts, indeed I’ve seen more short films these past couple days than I usually see in two months (especially now that the last bastion of cinematically shown shorts, Pixar, has quit). Ever since an Australian called Charles Tait made an hour-long movie about Ned Kelly and subsequently an American by the name of D.W. Griffiths supplanted it with a three-hour monstrosity, short films have struggled to be taken seriously next to features. But short films, in addition to often being the testing ground for most early filmmakers, are an art unto themselves, and can produce great talent and artistry as well as any feature.

       Some exist to pay tribute to talent and artistry, as is the case with The Faces We Wear, a ten minute documentary about the work and life philosophy of Italian-Canadian acting coach and mask sculptor Teodoro Dragonieri. The short, goateed man is a delight, and the movie fulfils its aim in making his background and somewhat eccentric methods resonate.

       Other short films are meant to tell brief but personal stories from passionate if inexperienced filmmakers. The Boy at Platform 3, a German film based on a short story by its director has a lot of layers for such a small runtime -addressing themes of melancholy, ennui, broken households and neglect, as well as hope in its depiction of a boy who spends his days watching trains and muttering a half-remembered story to himself.

       And then there are short films meant to convey an idea through an idiosyncratic approach like PIX, another German film that depicts a human life through a series of manufactured poses for photographs at various milestones (graduation, marriage, children, old age, etc.) There’s something to be said for the unfiltered falseness of it all, crewmembers and characters moving in a stop-motion effect to set up and take down each context; as well as the fact that between the poses everybody looks miserable.

       However I’ve always adored animated shorts especially, from the aforementioned Pixar films to the work of Lotte Reiniger, The Snowman, Pearl, Disney’s heartbreaking Little Matchgirl, and countless Looney Tunes cartoons. The ones I caught at RIFFA’s Wednesday showings were all experimental in nature, starting with a crude and deliberately off-putting American film called Roundabout, where a world floating in space as a single roundabout literally to the grave is the cursed existence of a strange person with enormous protruding eyes as well as a family of moles. It was followed by the Spanish Madrid-Atocha, an animated tour through Madrid and its highly divergent environments, peoples, and cultures, framed through the window of a subway train. And the last animated short I saw was Flora, a beautifully rendered four minute piece of a transforming substance in patterns reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe with sporadic narration on flowers and genitalia -a little stereotypically artsy you might say.

       There was a feature slipped into the short film collection though. An hour-length documentary called Blue Roses focused on the poverty situation and community outreach in Ottawa's inner city. Mere blocks from the seat of government, numerous people are living in bad, infested rooming houses with debilitating illnesses, addictions, and mental health problems. Told primarily from the point-of-view of a peer supporter who was lucky to rise out of that life and has now dedicated himself to being a friend and helper of the city's most neglected, it's a good story that raises relevant social awareness, despite some noticeable technical cheapness on its edges.

       A more professional feature is Wolves Unleashed: Against All Odds, a film by wolf trainer Andrew Simpson, chronicling the two year process of raising and training a pack of wolves for use in a movie, 2015's Wolf Totem, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose, Seven Years in Tibet). It's utterly fascinating to see all that goes into training animals to be essentially actors in a movie -something even most of us film enthusiasts don't often think about; as well as the journey of geography, discipline, the evolution of the pack and the relationships the wolves forge with the trainers. It's quite good, and makes me not only want to watch Wolf Totem now, but gives me a greater appreciation for the exceptionally hard work of animal trainers on movie productions.

       I really love the convenience of most of these screenings being in one place, the Normanview Cineplex. It gives me the road map of exactly where I'll be spending most of the week.

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