DIMANCHE (Sunday)

Dir: Patrick Doyon
Canada – 2011

This animated short is a love letter to children’s imagination. After church, a family gathers at grandma and grandpa’s. It’s a Sunday like any other, except for the factory closing that has the grown-ups worried. As usual, a young boy chases away his boredom by playing with coins on the railroad tracks. He finds, to his surprise, that there are amazing sides to some coins. This animated fable for the whole family shows us how important it is to see life through a child’s eyes — even on a grey Sunday afternoon.

• Nominated for Academy Award, Short Animated Film

Duration: 9:00

BEAR

Dir: Nash Edgerton
Australia – 2011

Edgerton wrote, directed and starred in Bear, the sequel to Spider (2007). The film centres around the main character Jack, unfolding his tangled relationship and examining whether he’s learned his lesson or not. Described as a black comedy without social commentary, Bear is a follow up but also stands alone as its own piece. “Because I tend to play things fairly straight and never set things up like it’s a drama or a comedy, the audience doesn’t know what it’s going to be, and something about that really works,” says Edgerton.

• Nominated for Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes Film Festival

Duration: 08:55

QUADRANGLE

Dir: Amy Grappell
United States – 2010

An examination of a four-way affair, this documentary explores the story of two “conventional” couples who swap partners and live in a group marriage in the early 1970s. Set in Long Island, New York, this domestic living experiment unravels and challenges the boundaries of social convention, marriage, monogamy and desire. “Inspired by the discovery of my father’s photographs, taken at the height of the poly-amorous affair, and in an effort to come to terms with my own past, I decided to interview my parents. The film does not propose answers and strives to remain objective. It explores two people in a certain time. It tells a story,” says Grappell.

• Honorable Mention for Short Filmmaking Award at Sundance Film Festival

Duration: 19:00

LOVE YOU MORE

Dir: Sam Taylor-Wood
United Kingdom – 2007

Inspired by the hit song “Love You More” by the Buzzcocks, this short is the tale of two punk lovers, Georgia and Peter, in 1978 London. Tender and explorative, this short film directorial debut by Taylor-Wood (Nowhere Boy) was written by Oscar nominee Patrick Marber and produced by Oscar winner Anthony Minghella.

• Nominated for BAFTA (UK) Award
• Nominated for Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes Film Festival

Duration: 15:00

TO DIE BY YOUR SIDE (Mourir auprès de toi)

Dir: Spike Jonze and Simon Cahn
France – 2011

Created from 3,000 hand-cut pieces of felt, Jonze’s tragicomic stop-motion animation takes place in an old Parisian bookshop (the famous Shakespeare and Company) where at night the covers come to life. It’s the story of a felt skeleton who falls in love with a beautiful and sassy vixen. Co-directed by filmmaker Simon Cahn with designs by Olympia Le-Tan, this short is sweet, sad, spooky and a bit whimsical. Jonze says, “A short is like a sketch. You can have an idea or a feeling and just go and do it.”

Duration: 7:00

THE MAN WITHOUT A HEAD (L’homme sans tête)

Dir: Juan Solanas
France – 2003

Created over 4 years, Solanas’ short debut is the story of a man who lives alone, head-less, in a room overlooking a vast industrial space. Visually astounding and technically accomplished, this animated short reveals love and happiness and one man’s pursuit of romance amidst life without a head. “We’re living in a period where cinema is a product; movies are becoming more and more commercialized. Short films are one of the last real places for artistic freedom – they’re important to celebrate just for that,” says Solanas.

• Winner of the Jury Prize for Best Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival
• Cesar Award (France) for Best Short Film

Duration: 18:00

VENUS

Dir: Tor Fruergaard
Denmark – 2010

Venus is an erotic comedy in claymation about rediscovering one another and finding the spark where you least expect it. An official selection of the Los Angeles and Annecy Animation Festivals, among others, Venus tells the story of Caroline and Rasmus, a confused couple who’ve not had sex in four months. To solve this, they decide to visit a swingers’ club to see if it might salvage their relationship.

• Grand Jury Sparky Award at the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival

Duration: 7:00

TROTTEUR

Dirs: Arnaud Brisebois, Francis Leclerc
Canada – 2010

A metaphor of adversity, an infernal race against a merciless adversary. A duel to settle between a young man and a locomotive.

• Canada’s Top Ten 2011
• Best Canadian Short at the Edmonton International Film Festival

Duration: 8:40

We screen at the NFB Mediatheque (150 John Street) on Friday April 13, 2012 at 7pm. Grab your tickets now!

The main part of the program will consist of the Future Shorts pop up festival selections. In addition, we’ll have a couple of incredible Canadian shorts. Full details on the program coming very soon!

Come out and support a new screening series for lovers of quality short film!

BUY ADVANCE TICKETS

Buy tickets for our January 13 screening!

I came across the work of 26-year-old Irish filmmaker David O’Reilly completely by accident a little more than a year ago. I was interested in applying for the Berlinale Talent Campus, a sort of workshop for various types of people working in film. I was interested in the program for film journalists, but at TIFF 2010, picked up a glossy brochure and DVD that featured selections from the entire spectrum of workshops. One of the featured sections is a competition for film composers and in 2010 the contestants were challenged to score a strange little animated film by David O’Reilly called Please Say Something (2009), about a troubled relationship between a cat and a mouse. Its use of computer-rendered, though crude, cartoon characters was unusual, as was the mixture of violence and intimacy. It was as if the director was trying to tell a human story using the most artificial means possible. I found it refreshingly different.

With his latest film The External World O’Reilly has used an episodic structure and characters who wander in and out of each other’s stories to tell an even more emotionally resonant tale. The framing story is of a boy learning to play a haunting piano piece, coached by an abusive teacher who violently strikes him each time he makes a mistake. But the other stories and characters are often absurdly funny, and O’Reilly is fond of using imagery from cartoons and videogames which adds a heightened sense of action (and violence) to the proceedings. This is a constantly surprising piece of work with many laugh out loud moments, but by the end, it’s strangely moving. I can truthfully say I’ve never seen anything quite like it. This short trailer will give you a small idea of the mixture of moods.

I’ve been hesitant to write a post on this particular film because it’s available to watch in its entirety on YouTube. But I suspect that seeing this on a large screen with a group of other people will heighten the laughs as well as the more sombre notes, so I encourage you to come to our screening before succumbing to the temptation to watch it on the small screen. But after our screening, I strongly encourage you to go to the film’s website (linked below) where you can download a high-definition version of the film for just €4.

• Official site of director David O’Reilly
• Vimeo channel of director David O’Reilly
• Official site of the film

Buy tickets for our January 13 screening!

Argentinian director Juan Pablo Zaramella has been making short films for a decade, but while he started as a claymation animator, his latest film is an interesting sort of “live action” claymation, in which real actors are animated frame by frame like clay figures. This form of animation, called stop-motion, is painstakingly slow, since each frame must be composed and shot separately. It seems especially difficult when working with live actors, who are not able to hold their positions the way inanimate models can.

Luminaris is the story of a man living in a world controlled and timed by light. Every morning, the inhabitants of that world are woken up and pulled to their jobs by sunlight, as if this was some sort of magnet. The main character has a routine job in a factory that makes electric light bulbs. But he has something else in mind that could change the order of things. The setting of the film is a classic Buenos Aires, revisited from a fantastic point of view. The film uses a collage of styles, combining art deco, tango, surrealism, and neorealism. This mix of influences is directly linked with the history of Buenos Aires: the city and its population themselves are a mix of different cultures.

The film was inspired by an instrumental tango piece called “Lluvia de Estrellas” (Star Rain) composed by Osmar Maderna in the 1940s. Director Juan Pablo Zaramella explains:

I first became acquainted with this piece of music as a child, because my elders used to listen to it. I had always liked this piece but, as an adult, it gradually dawned on me that this music could be like a score of a film that had never been made. In 2008 I was granted a creativity residency by Abbaye de Fontevraud, in France. I decided to take this opportunity to develop this project. Originally, I approached the project as a puppet animation story, but doing some pixilation tests in the gardens of Fontevraud, just for fun, the seed of the present short appeared: the idea of sunlight as a magnetic force.

The film took more than two years to make, mainly due to the unpredictability of weather conditions and especially the movement of the sun, which changed the shadows on the locations every day. “Both the speed and the intensity of sunlight changed during the shooting of a take, so we had to modify the time-lapse frequency and the exposure of the photographs all the time,” explains Sergio Piñeyro, director of photography.

The long months of work paid off; the film was recently named to the Oscar® shortlist for Best Animated Short Film. From this list of ten films, three to five will receive official nominations for the Academy Award® in late January.

• Official site of director Juan Pablo Zaramella
• “Lluvia de estrellas” by Osmar Maderna (YouTube clip of performance by Osmar Maderna and his orchestra circa 1948)
• Luminaris makes Oscars® shortlist (press release)

I’ve been talking to the people at Future Shorts since early in 2011, and am so happy that we are finally launching with them as a partner. Future Shorts, the largest short film network in the world, is a UK-based organization that was founded in 2003 to promote short films from all over the globe to audiences all over the globe. Their sister company Future Cinema has become renowned for re-imagining the filmgoing experience through events like the incredible Secret Cinema.

The organization has recently tweaked their programming and partnership requirements, making it much easier for anyone anywhere to host a screening. They’ve done this by featuring a quarterly program of films in a “pop up festival” format which can be shown anywhere in the world in venues of all sizes. The current program, which we’ll be showing on Friday January 13 (get your tickets!), will be screened in more than 75 cities in 50 countries between November and January. In fact, on the night of our screening, the program will also be showing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Glasgow, Scotland. What’s amazing is that the films have also screened in such far-flung places as Afghanistan, Rwanda, Palestine and Vietnam.

With your support, I hope to make Shorts That Are Not Pants a regular quarterly event and if we can make that happen together, we’ll be working with Future Shorts again. Come on out to our first screening on Friday January 13th at 7pm at the NFB Mediatheque (150 John St. at Richmond). Tickets are just $10 at the door ($5 if you’re wearing shorts), or $8 in advance.

• Future Shorts YouTube Channel
• Future Shorts Festival Screenings

Buy tickets for our January 13 screening!

Marv Newland is a legend in the world of animation. His first film Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969) became a sensation, even in the days before the Internet made seeing it as simple as a visit to YouTube. Over the past four decades, he’s created his own films and worked on other animated work (Barbapapa, promos for MTV, Sesame Street, YTV, MuchMusic, and Nickelodeon, among many others), picking up a slew of awards along the way.

His latest film CMYK will be fascinating to anyone who’s ever worked in the world of print design. Named for the four colours that make up the printing process (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black), this experimental short was painstakingly assembled by photographing printers’ registration marks and animating them to the music of Vancouver composer Lisa Miller, played by the acclaimed Quatuor Bozzini string quartet.

• Newland and animator Kunal Sen discuss how they made the film
• Composer Lisa Kay Miller discusses the music used in the film
• A short profile of Newland by his friend, photographer Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
• Official site of animator Kunal Sen, who worked on the film with Newland.

Buy tickets for our January 13 screening!

Our second closeup is on Luke Matheny’s Oscar-winning short film God of Love. Matheny himself plays Raymond, a lounge-singing darts champion who is in love with Kelly (Marion Brock), the drummer in his band. Unfortunately, she’s in love with Fozzie (Christopher Hirsch), the band’s guitarist. Things change when Raymond receives an anyonymous package of “love darts” that are a modern update of Cupid’s arrows. Is it as simple as firing one at his crush?

I remember seeing the goofy-looking Matheny giving a joyful acceptance speech at the 2011 Oscars® when his film won the award for Best Live-Action Short. It almost looked like “acting” in the film wasn’t that much of a stretch for him. He admits that the idea for the film came out of his own experiences of unrequited love:

As someone who has had plenty of unrequited crushes on various girls throughout the years, I was eager to tell a story that celebrates unrequited love. But as someone who can now recognize his earlier crushes as, well, let’s be honest, absurd exercises in delusion, I was also determined to critique the image of the lovestruck hero.

And as someone else who has had his share of unrequited loves, I’m looking forward to seeing how he works this one out. Here, just for fun, is Luke learning about his nomination for the Academy Award while he was attending the 2011 Sundance Film Festival:

• Official site of the director/film
• Tumblr site of the director, not updated since the Oscar win
• The Date – a new short film from Luke Matheny
• Luke Matheny’s acceptance speech at the 2011 Academy Awards® ceremony

Thanks to the generous folks at Mongrel Media, we’re happy to announce that we’ll be giving away copies of BOTH collections of animated treasures from the NFB at our screening in January.

Animation Express (2009) contains 26 films, including two Oscar winners (The Danish Poet by Torill Kove, and Ryan by Chris Landreth) and one that SHOULD have won, the brilliant Madame Tutli-Putli. Other highlights are Land of the Heads, Sleeping Betty and Cordell Barker’s Runaway.

The recently-released Animation Express 2 (2011) features 22 films, including the two NFB films we’re screening (CMYK and Wild Life) and a host of other greats. I really liked Sunday and Big Drive, and am looking forward to catching up with the rest.

Buy your advance tickets for just $8 and join us on Friday January 13th at 7pm at the NFB Mediatheque for your chance to win (and a great screening, too)!

Over the coming weeks, I’m going to begin breaking down our program film by film. Hopefully, this will make you wild with enthusiasm which will lead you to buy advance tickets immediately for yourself and all your friends. Fingers crossed, anyway.

I first became aware of Australian filmmaker Ariel Kleiman when I saw his short Young Love on Wholphin No. 11. It features a man being berated by a woman in another language in the middle of a field of llamas. It reminded me very much of a skit we used to perform in my church youth group where we literally spoke gibberish for the whole thing. Incredibly funny to me, not so much for the audience. It’s interesting that for Deeper Than Yesterday he also chose to work in a foreign language. This time, we’re among a group of Russian submariners who have been at sea maybe a little too long.

Deeper Than Yesterday was the 26-year-old director’s graduation film from the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne. The film has had a tremendous festival run, playing at Karlovy Vary and the Semaine de la critiques at Cannes in 2010 and at Sundance in 2011, and winning awards at all three.

On where he got the idea for the film:

I think the idea came from living in a shared house with my girlfriend Sarah and our business partner Ben. The three of us were all best friends who worked and lived together for a couple of years. After a while, I began to fear we were all losing our tempers and our minds. This was the beginning of Deeper than Yesterday. The shoot itself was, to date, the most eye-opening and traumatic undertaking of my life. From the bottom of my heart, I do not recommend shooting on a submarine.

• Official site of the film
• Official site of Ariel Kleiman
• A recent interview with the director
• A Little Off The Top, one of Kleiman’s earlier short films