Small wonders

Sundance Shorts ’09 is a well-programmed
night of innovative short filmmaking

DECADENT DECAY: Next Floor

by MARK SLUTSKY

There’s no kind way to say this: I do not enjoy shorts programs. I don’t know why, but there’s something about them that always leaves me exhausted and vaguely depressed. Rare is the discovery of a truly excellent or inspired piece of art at a film festival shorts showcase. That said, the short film or video can be an exciting form when it is at its best: a vehicle for ideas and experimentation that might not necessarily work at feature length.

So I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by what I got to see of Sundance Shorts ’09, a self-evidently named (and free!) presentation of Prends ça court! showing at Monument-National this Saturday. Thank the programmers of the Sundance Film Festival, from whence the selection was culled—as far as I could tell, these are all worth seeing, with technically accomplished and inspired storytelling.

If you haven’t seen Next Floor, the acclaimed new short from local filmmaker Denis Villeneuve (Maëlstrom), this is a great opportunity to do so. Set at a banquet where various decadent, decaying posh types stuff themselves, collapsing the floor beneath them, the film is a fairly transparent allegory, with a disgusted, disgusting view of food that I personally take exception to—but I can’t deny the creativity of the filmmaking and production design. It’s somewhere between Buñuel and Terry Gilliam and you really should see it.

The funniest, weirdest and strangely sexiest short may be Martin Jalfen and Javier Lourenco’s The Blindness of the Woods, which involves the carnal activities of a rural Swedish knit-puppet-woman-creature in a washed-out ’70s style that is kind of impossible to describe here, but just take my word for it, it’s something else. I also really liked Brady Corbet’s tense, tightly controlled Protect You + Me, an elliptical film that slowly simmers to a frothing boil. Laurent Briet’s Rope a Dope is an invigorating, wordless story of a skip-rope competition between a teenage girl and a tough boxer, and it’s a treat as well.

Finally, I didn’t get to see it, but it’s also worth noting that this will be your chance to view Out of Our Minds, a Viking-inflected fantasy directed by Tony Stone and conceived by and starring our own Melissa Auf der Maur.

SUNDANCE SHORTS ’09 SHOWS AT
THE MONUMENT-NATIONAL (1182
ST-LAURENT) THIS SATURDAY,
FEB. 28, 8 P.M., FREE