Sunday, 25th September, 2011
Globe Theatre Upstairs

By Simone Keiran and Aidie Keiran-Arney

A collective theme runs through the short movies crafted by young filmmakers for the 2011 Youth by Youth Film Competition, an annual feature of the Calgary International Film Festival: the problems they perceive are apocalyptic in nature, overwhelming in scope, and hopes are fragile and tenuous. Even at the elementary school level, they are anxious to reach out and overcome the experience of alienation between people. The most innocuous and lighthearted of the films had philosophical inquiry at their core, not to mention crushing social critiques and violent explosions. These young filmmakers have wrestled and wrangled the monstrous scale of these problems into scenes and stories small enough to fit through the camera iris. The results were surprisingly elegant  and well-realized.

The choices of storytelling techniques and imagery used enough creative and intelligent variety that Cathy McKee, director of the Reel Fun Film Festival and a judge, mentioned it right off the hop: “Everyone always says that making a choice is difficult, but this year, we really mean it! It was so hard to choose, we decided to include some honourable mentions.”

Young Filmmakers Highlight the Heavy Lifting Ahead for Today’s Youth

In Integral Theory, Nannak Sobhil, writer and co-director, and Jasha Makan, co-director, combine the theme of alienation and the investigation of what constitutes an alternate dimension, both, into a very cerebral exploration of consciousness itself.

The disaffection, boredom and loneliness which Iklan Kuan’s lead character experiences prompt him to undertake dangerous risks in order to re-create, in physical form, the ‘Fourth Dimensional’ state of disconnection he perceives in his friends when they sign off from the ‘Second Dimensional’ virtual reality. The use of his physical body as the guinea pig in an experiment involving comas resonates closely with David Gilbert’s 2004 novel, The Normals, where another over-educated and alienated young man strives to overcome his existential futility and unemployment problems, in that particular story by hiring his body out to test experimental-phased pharmaceuticals. Sobhil and Makan quietly dispatch what, at first, seemed to be an open-ended resolution with a shocking and provocative declaration.

Along a similar vein, there was the lesser realized speculative sci-fi piece, The Scissors about a special pair of the things capable of snipping wormholes between dimensions. The visuals wavered between a few oddly framed images to highly saturated scenes and original illustrations. I wasn’t sure if the director intended for the lead character to be an unreliable narrator by the certain inconsistencies which arose between his actions and his sermons, but that was the final effect. Although, at times, the delivery bordered on pedantic, the filmmaker approached the subject with imagination and flair.

This was followed by the sombre post-apocalyptic prose-poem, The Plant. A traveller in tattered clothing wanders through sepia-tinted badlands, struggling to foster hope in the washed-out landscape. The extreme contrasts of light and dark values and shimmering, solarized edges say more about life in extremis, where light is too brilliant and harsh, and darkness too solid. The camera work in this piece was breathtaking.

Black Snow, about the 1917 Halifax Harbour explosion, was a three-part composite documentary, that involved a full classroom of cast and crew: the first scenes being re-enactments from the collision, which set off the catastrophic chain of events; the second involved a news report style recitation of facts, interspersed with images of the modern-day harbour, the park, schools and artifacts; the third involved a musical ballad performed by a Halifax elementary school student superimposed over period clips and stills which evoked the history of the region. The various pieces linked modern and early 20th century Halifax together, to show how much the city was shaped by this event. This was the piece that won the elementary level prize.

Alienation returned in the claymation short, Be the Hero; a plea to save our oceans from impending environmental apocalypse was at the heart of another stop-motion piece, Destruction of Construction; and a fable about the folly of pride was the key of the classical drawing-based re-telling of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Fir Tree. Only the very clever and amusing stop-motion animated object short, Epic Car Race, made a complete dash away from pedagogy and angst.

A 15-Year-Old Weighs In

Since this special feature was about youth, I brought my teenager, Aidie, along to gain her feedback and discuss how the shows affected her.

“I found all the shows were very well done. My favourite was Rock, Paper, Scissors.”

This was the senior high level prizewinning entry — an amusing stop-motion cautionary tale about a sore loser and the abuse of seemingly absolute power — by Sarah Clark, with some assistance from her brother, Chad.

“I liked it because of the creativity and simplicity. The techniques which went into making the film brought out a quality which was very near perfect.”

Nathan Pronyshyn, Stage Director for Vertigo “Y” Theatre and judge, also praised Clark’s seamless animation and concise, elegant storytelling.

“I absolutely loved The Lonely Rock,” Aidie continued. “It was utterly cute, a simple story about a rock who can find no one like him. It was slightly emotional and had a lot of truth to it. In a way, we are all ‘Lonely Rocks’.”

The original Lonely Rock in question has been removed from its element, and its quest through foreign terrain for companionship of a particular sort —that of others like itself — recalls the vulnerability of the baby bird in P. D. Eastman’s classic preschool storybook, “Are You My Mother?”

Aidie’s final choice was the judge’s elementary school level honourable mention The Birthday in which construction paper cut-out explosions and clouds of smoke brilliantly conveyed a cat’s sentiments about the things it hates, “I had no idea what the creator was trying to say, but the colours were so bright and the randomness of the plot made everyone laugh.”

When it came to the sobering content, “All of the short films had a strong moral theme or warning statement about what could happen. I found that the messages were subtle enough that it didn’t feel as though the filmmakers were scolding us, or acting parental and telling us what to do. They raised a lot of interesting points for discussion.

“For my part, I prefered when information was not spoken in a flat monotone, as I lost focus and drifted off, and I also prefered the bright coloured images over the sepia tones and old photos.”

The Youth by Youth Film Competition has been an important component of the Calgary International Film Festival for several years. Films accepted into this portion of the festival must be between thirty seconds and seven minutes in length, and directed by filmmakers who are between nine and eighteen years in age. The content may be fiction or nonfiction. The competition provides an excellent venue to see the talent which is emerging in young filmmakers these days, as well as a chance to see what’s on their minds.

“When I was a kid, my friends and I would shoot films, but we had no place to show them, except a few sketchy sites,” said Andrew Phung, the show’s MC and program director. “Now, these kids are building themselves major audiences on youtube and other sites, and it shows in their films. It’s a whole new world for filmmakers.”

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