ShortStick

This past weekend Josh attended Ottawa International Animation Festival and took in some of the best the animation world has to offer. Here are three shorts that stuck out as some of the best of the bunch! States of Matter , dir. Marvin Hauck An experimental journey unfolds in Marvin Hauck’s enigmatic short film States of Matter,  a strata-cut animation, born from the alchemy of wax and paper. The film echoes the mysterious cycle of metamorphosis: molten wax, once fluid and f

Confession , dir. Rebeka Bizubová Documentaries have the formal capacity of emanating truth and reality. Hence, the possibilities are infinite. An example of the limitless power of the medium is Spoved' (Confession) by Rebeka Bizubová. The Slovak director portrays her personal story of a sexual assault that happened a few years ago and still echoes loudly in her mind. The director analyzes her personal pain in two different scenarios: confessing to her best friend and confess

In ‘ A Sparrow's Song ’ we follow an elderly widow who finds herself in the harrowing throes of the struggles of World War II. She is serving as an air raid warden in a busy shelter, with daily occurrences of air raid alarms slowly wearing down her hope of returning to a normal life. Already struggling to overcome the grief of losing her partner, she is forced to witness the suffering of the people and children around her as they all scurry to take shelter together. One morni

flower_gan , dir. Mati Granica “The work that you are seeing is perfectly legal—but should it be?” The unconventionally inventive short film  flower_gan stands at the crossroads of creativity and technology, confronting head-on the future of filmmaking with both curiosity and critique. It challenges the promises of AI-driven creation where speed and scale threaten to dissolve the human touch and asks what is lost when art becomes data. In a landscape rushing toward automatio

The 12 Inch Pianist , dir. Lucas Ansel Lucas Ansel's short film is centered around a classic joke involving a bar, a genie with a hearing problem, and a miniature pianist. Ansel, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, created this as his senior film, drawing inspiration from Simon Rich's short story "Guy Walks Into a Bar," published in The New Yorker in 2013. Rich took the well-worn and somewhat crude gag and extended it into the world just beyond the titular punchli

The Shyness of Trees , dirs. Sofiia Chuikovska, Loïck du Plessis D’Argentré, Lina Han, Simin He, Jiaxin Huang, Maud Le Bras and Bingqing Shu The Shyness of Trees is a meditative story about 40 year old Hélène who takes a trip to visit her aging mother. She lives alone in the french countryside, surrounded by thriving plants and garden insects taking up every corner of her home. Hélène knocks on the front door but gets no response, so she lets herself in only to find her moth

In Part 2 of our Student Academy Award Winner series we break into the documentary category to review Tatiana McCabe's Tides of Life. See our full review below! Tides of Life , dir. Tatiana McCabe Jacques-Yves Cousteau is quintessential to documentary filmmaking and marine biology. After creating his diving suit, the multi-talented French man would document his dives, culminating in the 1956 film The Silent World, co-directed with Louis Malle. It won the 1956 Palme d'Or. Henc

Welcome to our Student Academy Award Series. We are very excited to be back for a third year highlighting and celebrating the Student Academy Winners leading up to the medal ceremony on October 6th. We kick things off with Live Action winner Kubrick, Live I Love You, directed by Zefan Wang. Kubrick, Like I Love You , dir. Zefan Wang Fei is facing a problem that would horrify any cinephile. “My girlfriend doesn’t know who Kubrick is!” (Or Renoir, or Bergman, or Tarkovsky, or…)

Here at ShortStick we like to leave no stone unturned, exploring every genre of short film, including experimental shorts and some of the stranger corners of short film. Some of the best work in short film can be found in more experimental blocks that TIFF offers like Wavelengths and Strange Cuts. We are lucky to have writers on this site like Josh and Pedro who are passionate about this unique style of film-making. Here they write about five of their favourites from these bl

TIFF, as always, brought the heat this year with their short film programs. It is always so exciting to attend a festival full of world and international premieres with every program having a little mix of everything genre-wise. For Short Cuts 5 and 6 we chose to review some of our favourites from the programs including Dish Pit, Arguments in Favor of Love and All The Empty Rooms. Dish Pit, dir. Anna Hopkins A year and a half ago, I quit my job at a local radio station. I had

Short Cuts 3 and 4 are in the books! Short Cuts 3 offered one of the strongest lineups of the festival with standouts like Sea Star, Asparagus Bear and the star-studded The Non-Actor. Throughout both Short Cuts 3 and Short Cuts 4 a common through-line appeared in three shorts I have reviewed for these programs. Check out below as we review Dust to Dreams, What We Leave Behind and Ali - all stories about finding and using your voice. Dust to Dreams, dir. Idris Elba Idris Elba

It has been an amazing start to TIFF this year! Over the next couple weeks we will be covering shorts from every program at TIFF, starting with our favourites from Short Blocks 1 and 2. Each block had some really strong shorts. In Short Cuts 1 Jazz Infernal was a highlight as new immigrant, and son of a legendary trumpet player spends his first day in Canada. Agapito gave us heartfelt emotion and DISC brought down the house with laughter and its stellar screenplay and acting.