Today's guest blogger is Meredith Mantik. Meredith is a film major at Colorado College, currently doing an internship in Sydney in the Possible Worlds office. Here is her sneak peak at the award winning short films in this year's program.
HIGGLETY PIGGLETY POP!
A combination of live-action, digital animation, stop motion and puppetry, Higglety Pigglety Pop! (or There Must Be More To Life) is voiced by Oscar-winners Meryl Streep & Forest Whitaker. The 23 minute film tells the story of Jennie, a pup who leaves her decent home of domesticity for a slew of suspenseful and whimsical endeavors in order to realize her dream of starring in the World Mother Goose Theatre.
Produced by Spike Jonze, it's adapted from a book by Maurice Sendak (Where The Wild Things Are). The film's directors, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, are the duo behind the Cannes-winning, Oscar-nominated Madame Tutli-Putli.
Here's the trailer:
RUNAWAY
One of Canada’s most acclaimed animators and two-time Oscar-nominee Cordell Barker returns with his new short film, Runaway. Set aboard an out-of-control train, Barker’s madcap romp is also a parable about class which couples poignant themes with darkly funny comedy. As First Class gentry become haughty loungers and Economy passengers become martyrs, Barker criticizes class behavioral differences. Taking 8 years to complete, Runaway has an animation style that’s punchy and completely hand-drawn as well as a soundtrack composed by Benoit Charest (The Triplets of Belleville)
Here's the trailer:
MOVE YOUR MIND
Move Your Mind is a tribute to stage director, actor, designer, and teacher, Robin Phillips, who was recently given the Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards. The film portrait was commissioned by the National Film Board as part of a series commemorating the recipients.
One of Canada’s greatest English-language stage directors, Robin Phillips founded the Stratford Young Company as a school for actors and directors and has directed many works from Long Day’s Journey into Night to The Marriage of Figaro and Jekyll and Hyde. This 5-minute impressionistic short documentary is written and directed by Oscar-nominated Canadian filmmaker Hubert Davis.
Cold Morning (2009)
THREE SHORTS BY MARK LEWIS
Mark Lewis has become a leading figure in avant-garde cinema, and although he is based out of London, he often looks to his native Canada to set his films. These short films represented Canada at the 2009 Venice Biennale.
In Nathan Phillips Square, A Winters Night, Skating, for example, a man and a woman skate in front of a rear-projected Toronto cityscape. And while the film’s foreground focuses on the graceful couple, the camera’s movement emphasizes the disconnected landscape of the rear projection. This effect forces us to examine our notion of spatial perception, and the use of rear projection connotes its own history of “cheesy” cinematic technology to give dreamlike romanticism to the skaters’ world.
Cold Morning, while also set in downtown Toronto, centers on a very different subject matter. For seven-and-a-half minutes, it follows the morning routine of a homeless man. Although we never see his face, we watch him fold his sleeping bag, greet passers-by, commune with pigeons, and pace across the screen. The film enables the viewer to gain respect and empathy toward this man’s seemingly trivial exploits.
Lewis sets his third film, TD Centre, 54th Floor, atop the Mies van der Rohe-designed Toronto-Dominion Centre in downtown Toronto. The entirety of this four-minute film consists of a single tracking shot that moves horizontally and directs the viewer’s attention to the street below. The slow pacing and simplicity of this film as well as both Phillips Square, A Winters Night, Skating and Cold Morning compels the viewer to reflect on his or her urban surroundings with new objectivity.
The short films will screen before selected features. The full Possible Worlds program will be revealed on Canada Day, July 1st 2010.