Not kid stuff

>> YoungCuts showcases impressive
up-and-coming filmmaking talent

by MARK SLUTSKY

With 100 short films screening this week, the YoungCuts Film Festival might be the pre-eminent showcase for under-25 filmmaking talent in North America. The festival began some years ago and some several hundred kilometers down the 401; says fest chairman Jay Moulton, “It was originally started in Toronto in 2001, when it was called the International Teen Movie Festival. Then we took over the fest three years ago, and we changed the name. We held the event in 2005 in Toronto, and we moved it to Montreal last year.”

As the name implies, youth is definitely the fest’s focus. “The mandate of the festival is to showcase the best emerging filmmakers, 25 years old and younger, across North America,” Moulton says. “Obviously we’re pretty highly concentrated on Canadian talent just because of our location.”

It’s not entirely Canuck-oriented though, with entries coming from the U.S., the Netherlands, Australia and Turkey. What might be the most impressive thing about the fest, though, isn’t the number and breadth of the entries, but their impressive quality, given that shorts programs at any film festival tend to be a mixed bag, to say the least.

Screenings run nightly all week, with four programs on Saturday and Sunday. Each program consists of about nine films, ranging in length from two to 20 minutes, and each has a loose theme, like “Teen” or “Young @ Heart” or even “Teddy Bears & Gravity.” Though, as Moulton says, “The thread can be fairly loose. It’s pretty eclectic, so you will get a fairly good cross-section on any night.”

The films represent a broad range of genre and stylistic approaches. Catherine Cooper’s The Tinkerers Sharpening Service is a documentary, shot on black and white super-8 film, about a married pair of travelling knife sharpeners who tell their story in voice-over; it’s a sweet biographical sketch. On the very other end of the stylistic spectrum is Laurynas Navidauskas’s Good Night, Sleep Tight, a formally inventive flick that incorporates live action, stop-motion and rear-projection to tell a fairy-tale-like story of an evil witch and a teddy bear, all set to a haunting original score.

Speaking of formal invention, credit is also definitely due to Vincent Roy-Lavallée and Joshua Selinger’s Smilin’ in the Rain, which came out of the Concordia filmmaking program; it’s a very funny staged—and deliberately stagey—musical about love and halitosis. Some sound design beyond the music might have helped this one, but it’s an impressive little achievement unto itself.

In addition to the regular screenings at the Cinéma du Parc, the festival opens with a big gala on Thursday, Aug. 16 at Ristorante Cavalli (2040 Peel), in an event presented by the High Fidelity HDTV network, with which YoungCuts is announcing a new program aimed at funding work by young filmmakers—significantly enough for Canada, without any government cash whatsoever. At $90, tix for the gala are steep, but rest assured that proceeds go to benefit the Colorectal Cancer Association of Canada, and, if you can’t afford that, tix for individual programs are far less expensive, in the $5-$7 range.

YoungCuts runs at the Cinéma du
Parc from Aug. 17-23; for more info and
screening times,see www.youngcuts.com

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