Alex Heeney picks 8 must-see short films at TIFF 2024 from around the world.
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Almost every year since 2015, Seventh Row has published an annual feature (2015, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022) on the best short films at the Toronto International Film Festival. Past festival highlights include Carol Nguyen’s documentary about excavating family trauma and silence, No Crying at the Dinner Table; Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s existential stop-motion musical The Burden; and Nikita Diakur’s comedic animated documentary backflip.
Seasoned feature filmmakers like Philippe Falardeau and Mina Shum agree that short films are more challenging to make than features. Festival shorts are also a great preview of rising talent. Most filmmakers must prove themselves with a short before making a feature. Some of the most vital, daring filmmaking at the festival can always be found within the shorts program; this year is no exception.
Below, I’ve compiled a list of eight must-see short films at the festival in alphabetical order. The films come from Norway, Kosovo, Croatia/France/Bulgaria, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Indigenous filmmakers in Canada and the United States. These fiction and non-fiction films are in various genres (including musicals and horror) and styles.
Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin (Catherine Boivin, Canada)
Atikamekw filmmaker Catherine Boivin excavates intergenerational trauma and a mother’s attempt to stop the cycle in Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin. Told in split screen, the film’s opening image is of a mother doing dishes in one panel and a toddler playing in another room. In voiceover, the mother speaks to her mother about her childhood trauma, her desire to forgive her mother to let go of her anger, and the challenges of growing up with intergenerational trauma.
When we first meet the young girl in the adjacent frame, we assume she is the mother’s daughter, but as the film progresses, she also seems to represent the mother’s inner damaged child. It’s a brilliant and heartrending visual metaphor. Even doing basic domestic tasks, her childhood is on her mind. Here, her daughter isn’t just in another room or another frame, but she hopes she can keep her divorced from the intergenerational trauma that has marked her.
Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin makes its world premiere in Short Cuts Programme 6.
The Beguiling (ishkwaazhe Shane McSauby, USA)
It’s a little hard to talk about what makes The Beguiling great without spoiling it, but it’s one of the funniest, most original, most literal jaw-dropping films I’ve seen at the festival. Two Indigenous people end their date on the woman’s doorstep, where she invites the man in. Things seem to be going well, but she starts to ruin the mood when she wants to talk about the trauma of being Indigenous…on a first date? This horror-inflected film lives up to its programming slot in the “Strange Cuts” section, addressing some hot-button, hard-to-discuss-without-stepping-in-it issues with humour. Wait for the fantastic needle drop, which offers a lot to unpack, along with the rest of the film.
The Beguiling screens in the Strange Cuts programme
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (Nebojša Slijepčević, Croatia/France/Bulgaria/Slovenia)
This year’s Short Film Palme d’Or winner at Cannes, The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, is a brilliant and harrowing look at the early stages of the 1993 Bosnia genocide. In the film’s opening, a man pokes his head out of his train compartment to investigate why the train has suddenly stopped. A soldier informs the train conductor that they will be carding the passengers. The man is indignant that this should not be allowed to happen but returns to his compartment with his daughters, a pair of elderly gentlemen, and a terrified young man. The young man, he discovers, does not have ID.
Set almost entirely inside the compartment, Nebojša Slijepčević’s The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent is a tense thriller about how the most harrowing actions often happen just outside our door and after intense periods of waiting. Most of the film takes place in that waiting period of intense terror and false hope.
Like the passengers in the compartment, we can hear more than we can see of what’s happening to other passengers outside the compartment. Because the passengers listen intently for clues, Slijepčević’s sound design heightens every sound inside the compartment: the music leaking from the man’s teenage daughter’s headphones, objects touching, and the distant sounds of harassment just around the corner.
Recalling Quo Vadis, Aida?
Fans of Quo Vadis, Aida? will love this look at how horrific acts begin with bureaucracy, anticipation, and boredom. Slijepčević has made dozens of shorts, some TV series, and a feature, and that experience shows. This is expert filmmaking that engages all the senses. Every shot, sound, and moment is carefully considered for maximum emotional impact. It’s an unforgettable film.
The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent screens at TIFF in Short Cuts Programme 4
Masterpiece Mommy (Dorothy Sing Zhang, UK/China)
Dorothy Sing Zhang takes some huge formal risks in Masterpiece Mommy, a musical about the alienation of medical care and a fraught mother-daughter relationship. I don’t know if it fully hangs together, but I’m absolutely in awe of what does. Unfolding nonlinearly, the film unpacks why a middle-aged woman is getting a mammogram, accompanied by her young adult daughter, who may be assuaging some guilt and processing other complex emotions. Showing the process of getting a mammogram, the way your body turns into bits to be squeezed and examined, with mise en scène and sound design choices that emphasize the alienation, would be laudable enough.
But Sing Zhang also stealthily turns it all into a musical to excavate the collective experience of individual alienation, which is the anxiety of getting medical treatment and the feeling of being utterly alone despite being in a room full of people in the same situation. Following in the footsteps of classic musicals (rather than some of the recent drivel), the songs are an outlet for expressing repressed emotions that can’t be spoken. As an audience, we hear the chorus, but the characters don’t, a clever little device. Not every swing Sing Zhang takes lands, but it’s a film brimming with ideas. I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Maybe Elephants (Torill Kove, Canada/Norway)
The latest film by Oscar-winning animator Torill Kove (The Danish Poet), Maybe Elephants, is a memory piece in which a woman recounts how her whole family moved from Norway to Kenya during her adolescent years. Her mother’s “dark cloud” sparks the move. The animation allows for some wonderful visual metaphors: her mother’s depression that sparks the move becomes a literal “grey cloud” that surrounds her; when the protagonist and her sisters grow up and take divergent paths, Kove shows the lines of their paths on screen. The film also immerses us in Nairobi culture, which marks an exciting change of scene for the teenagers but loses its lustre for their depressed mother, who left her architect job to become a glorified family chauffeur.
Told with wit and humour, Maybe Elephants hits you in the feels while riffing on the coming-of-age narrative. This is more the story of a woman who feels distant from her beloved mother than the excitement of an adolescence abroad. Still, there is much love and joy in the family.
Maybe Elephants makes its world premiere in Short Cuts Programme 1.
On The Way (Samir Karahuda, Kosovo)
In Samir Karahuda’s formally rigorous On The Way, a filmmaker and his son contemplate the challenges of living in Kosovo while travelling to collect an award sitting at customs that the father has received for his films. The film is about the father and son’s divergent experiences with a possible Russian invasion, the mass exodus of friends and family from the country, the day-to-day financial troubles, and the hassle of even collecting an award from customs. That’s partly because the father attempts to keep these challenging realities outside his son’s experience.
Much of the film takes place inside a car en route to pick up the award, where Karahuda places father and son in closeups shot from different angles to create a separate world for parent and child. It’s some time before we see them share a frame except in wide shots. Karahuda uses long takes and wide shots to invoke the alienation and desolation of the characters. The film’s central set piece, which finds the father in a Kafkaesque situation trying to pick up his international award from customs, plays out in a wide shot through the car’s back window where his son sits in waiting, not seeing any of this play out. Shooting in the academy ratio, Karahuda’s characters feel confined within the frame. This is exceptionally thoughtful, emotionally resonant filmmaking.
On the Way screens in Short Cuts Programme 4.
Quota (Job Roggeveen, Joris Oprins, Marieke Blaauw, Netherlands)
This amusing three-minute animated short imagines a future where everyone has a carbon quota measured by their smartphones. Whenever you use electricity, burn wood, or do anything that might contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, your phone beeps to warn you that your quota is going down. What will happen when people’s quota gets used up, and will they do anything to stop it? Somewhat nihilistic and somewhat realistic, the film’s conceit is a clever way of visualizing our resource depletion and indifference. I’m not sure that it will inspire action (or is designed to), but sometimes, you need to laugh when the alternative is to cry.
Quota screens in Short Cuts Programme 5.
welima’q (shalan joudry, Canada)
Mi’kmaw filmmaker shalan joudry transports us into the sweetgrass picking process, bringing us to ground level where we can hear the wind in the grass, our heads to the ground with the characters’ hands. The film’s title is a Mi’kmaq word that roughly translates as “It smells good.” You might not be able to smell or taste the sweetgrass in the film, but joudry engages all the other senses. The sound design makes the experience tactile: watching someone else touch the sweetgrass and be immersed in it makes us feel that way, too, because we can hear the effects.
welima’q screens in Short Cuts Programme 1.
