2020 UWPG Film Festival nominees for Best Canadian Short announced
Domestic lineup “feels like home”
Jason Pchajek, staff writer
With a stellar crop of international submissions to this year’s UWPG Film Festival, you’d be remised if you didn’t check out the Canadian submissions as well.
Being made by an exclusively Canadian lineup does nothing to dampen the impact and scope of the projects, as the nominees show off the best that Canada’s multicultural ethos has to offer. Whether it’s a dreamlike picture of death, a father determining what he’s willing to sacrifice to give his children a good life, or a painter using art to process her past, this year’s race for Best Canadian Short will be a tight one.
anamnesis
“I’m trying to get to the water.”
Starting off, we have perhaps the most visually beautiful film among the Canadian nominees. Ryan Gransden and Mark Edwards created a superb film, that will burrow itself into your soul.
Once the truth is revealed, you will feel the goosebumps, as the resonant whine of the ending score kicks in, and we are all left watching, helpless and heartbroken, knowing the pain that is surely to come.
There is not much to say beyond the fact that this film is stellar and will stay with you long after it is over. The concept is simple, yet the feelings are complex, and to say much more would spoil it, so leave it at this: watch this film.
Dialogue Between Her and Me
Art is beautiful, especially when life is not.
It is not just beautiful for the eyes, or the ears, but for the soul. It uplifts, it moves, it changes, and it also heals.
In Simon Roberge’s film, we sit and listen, and are brought into this healing process of art.
Ginette Lafontaine’s story shows clearly that art is not just for the audience. It is just as much for the artist themselves. It has saved her. Helped her process the trauma of her life and helped her combat bouts of psychosis.
It has often been said that the mind of an artist is different than the common person. That there is some inherent characteristic, which ties the likes of Van Gogh, Picasso, and Da Vinci, with Hemingway, King, and Dostoyevsky. Ledger, with Poe. Cobain, with Banksy.
Dialogue Between Me and Her will move you, break you. It is an uncompromising picture of mental illness and trauma. The audience is forced to sit face-to-face with Lafontaine, as she unravels her process, tells her stories, and there is nowhere to turn. You cannot hide from it, like we ourselves are in the chair across from her, cup of tea in hand.
This film is art.
The Encounter
What do you do when you feel like things are stagnant?
What do you do when you realize you’ve become stuck in a crushing routine? That life itself has become so rote, so simple, that you could be asleep on your feet and not know it? This is something that many in the current global reality have found themselves within.
Each day passes by like the last. You make the trudge from your bed to the shower, to the coffeemaker, to your ‘temporary’ home workspace – really just the kitchen table – and you only get up to stretch your legs, go to the bathroom, and grab another cup.
You don’t go outside. The world just rolls by your window while you’re stuck.
In The Encounter a similar feeling is brought up. A woman’s marriage and work are the stagnant. She goes to the same coffeeshop, sits in the same spot, drinks the same thing, and does the same work.
But one day, she finds a camera, and a scrapbook. She doesn’t know where it’s from, or who put it there, but she feels compelled to do what the writer requests. Each day she takes the camera, snapping a photo, placing it in the book, and putting the book back in the same spot.
To explain more would ruin the surprise. Just know that when the truth of the book is revealed, you’ll feel so much love. It’s just infectious.
JE SUIS COMME LE ROI
What a perfect film for today’s political climate.
When everything is fake news, when politicians lie, when people believe it even though they know it can’t be true, when social media is a cesspool of arguments, half-truths, and spin, what is true is a matter of perspective.
We live in a world where gaslighting is as normal as breathing, when lies are propagated and rights are stripped in the name of “protecting” us.
This is where Louis St-Pierre’s triumph of a film lives, in the view that society is just the family writ large. Where the people you love will twist the truth, play on your fears and insecurities, and you go along with it, because they’d never do anything to hurt you right? They have your best interest at heart…right?
In a film where a mother stands in for a politician, a delinquent son stands in for a political dissident screaming ‘revolution’, a house stands in for a nation, the fight is on for the soul of a nation – or for your little sister.
JE SUIS COMME LE ROI, or in English I AM LIKE THE KING, is a masterclass in allegory, meaning, and commentary.
If anything, watch this film for the ending.
WORTH
Meelad Moaphi returns to the UWPG Film Festival with another brilliant film.
His previous work won the Toronto-based filmmaker several awards at the UWPG Film Festival, but that technical and creative talent has been squeezed out even more with WORTH. Moaphi turns out a beautiful and heartbreaking film about fatherhood and the price of freedom.
In WORTH a father must make the most difficult choice imaginable. Like a remake of Sophie’s Choice set in the Middle East, he must choose between ensuring that he and one child survive, breaking up the family in the process, or potentially condemn the three to death together.
The film is brilliant on a technical level, but it’s the moments of silence that get you, the acting that shatters your heart and will leave you screaming at your screen.
Last time around we knew Moaphi was a name to watch, and now we get the chance to see him shine.