by MATTHEW HAYS

Filmmaker Karl Raudsepp-Hearne decided to go against key words of advice about filmmaking. Those in the know often urge the uninitiated to avoid shooting on water and to avoid working with children.

“The only thing that would have made this short film any harder,” Raudsepp-Hearne says, “is if we’d included the kid’s pet on the lake.”

The short film he’s discussing, Men on a Lake, is a taut, minimalist 16-minute suspenser, an odd and keenly acted film about two men and a boy and their trek across a lake. The two older men’s motivations are entirely unclear—something that makes this unusual short film eerily evocative of a tense Harold Pinter play.

And Men on a Lake spooked enough people that Slamdance—the underground, more-indie-than-thou answer to the increasingly commercial Sundance Film Fest—has invited the short to screen later this month.

Raudsepp-Hearne’s film sounds deceptively simple, but he keeps the audience guessing as to precisely what is going on. “I really liked the idea of telling this story from the perspective of a boy,” explains Raudsepp-Hearne. “Why are the adults acting like this? As well, I thought a lot about a poem that Ted Hughes had written about fishing. Hughes likened fishing to waiting for a thought to arrive.”

Raudsepp-Hearne studied Chinese at McGill University before doing graduate work at the University of Nanjing, China. He then did a year at Concordia’s film school, but found himself becoming so immersed in his film work that he didn’t need to continue in the program. He has written or directed a number of different series, including Deadly Arts, a six-part miniseries on martial arts that aired on cable. Previous short films include Song (2002), and Raudsepp-Hearne has had a number of his projects air on the Bravo channel.

“I definitely see film as more akin to poetry than to narrative,” Raudsepp-Hearne says of his style. “People in North America tend to be a bit too concerned with the narrative form. I call it the tyranny of the narrative. I find open-ended stories are often far more powerful.”