TIFF50: Best of Short Cuts 1 and 2

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 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. In Short Cuts 2, I Fear Blue Skies gave a huge gut punch and Bots was an absolute wild ride. Meanwhile, Water Girl had such vivd imagination that it really stuck with me. Below we review 3 of these favourites in DISC, Agapito and Water Girl.

DISC, dir. Blake Winston Rice

In May 2024, Blake Winston Rice competed in the Cannes Film Festival short film competition section with his film, Tea. Narrating the story of a boy rehearsing to ask his crush on a date, the director explored the character's reactions to an allergic attack. A year later, the director is premiering his latest film, DISC, at another major event, the Toronto International Film Festival. The director portrays the aftermath of a one-night stand between Alex (Victoria Ratermanis) and Carey (Jim Cummings). Alex is the lecturer at a convention, and Carey is one of the participants of the event. When she is getting ready for her lecture, Alex realizes something is off with her menstrual disc, and a chaotic situation ensues. 

Blake Winston Rice designs an equally tense and thrilling short in his latest effort. In Tea, the makeup design impressed with its credible characterization of an anaphylactic attack. In DISC, the director thrills the audience through cinema's best magic trick: editing. Alongside Mike O'Brien's precise editing work, the director uses fast-paced cuts to build tension. Alex needs help with the stuck disc; the time is ticking, and someone is knocking at the motel's door. The musical score by Kevin Garrett ups the drama of the already stressful scene. The composer uses male voices to sing a note while in Alex's perspective. When it flips to Carey's perspective, the pitch is up, and the voices are more feminine. The scene highlights the reality that men often don't know much about women's hygiene prodcuts, including the variety of options that exist. It's clear that Alex feels shame in asking a sexual partner to help with something so intimate, perhaps even more intimate than the act of sex itself. 

The film extracts raw performances from Victoria Ratermanis, known for the recent Academy Award-nominated A Lien, and Jim Cummings, the indie actor and director of films such as Thunder Road. The actors are the main emotional drivers of the story and the actions of their characters are the dramatic axis of it. Ratermanis and Cummings both deliver physical performances through a plethora of body movements and facial expressions to explain the situation better than words ever could.

Blake Winston Rice is becoming a chronicler of our times, exploring unlikely and absurd situations. In Tea, he approaches anaphylactic shock, and DISC portrays the displacement of a menstrual cup. Do these situations happen all the time? No, but they are feasible and could occur to anyone. This rare yet attainable aspect of his films brings us closer to interacting with his creative choices and propositions. You can't help but feel tense and anxious as you watch these situations unfold.

The directing masterfully explores the situation to provoke discomfort: the knocking at the door, the worker waiting to clean the room, and the time ticking. Thus, Blake Winston Rice delivers another capsule of a disastrous situation to bring lovers or potential lovers together and ties in a ton of laughter and heart along the way. Similar to his work in Tea, after the storm has settled, Rice provides a raw tenderness and sweetness to cap the short off on a perfect note.

Review by: Pedro Lima

Agapito, dirs. Arvin Belarmino and Kyla Romero

In Agapito, we are immediately taken behind the scenes of a retro, run-down bowling alley. Instead of the bowling pins automatically resetting, we see the staff of the bowling alley sitting behind the lanes, manually placing the pins and sending back the balls that come hurtling down the lane. The unmistakable sounds of bowling balls crashing into pins matches the retro feel of the short film; it brought me right back to the days of going to the bowling alley with friends. Geia De Vera throws a perfect strike with the cinematography - she makes the manual monotony of repetitive action (resetting the pins time after time) look like a work of art in itself. 

This short centres around the manager of the bowling alley, Mira. Mira is closing the bowling alley early because her brother Junior is visiting. We come to find out that Junior has a disability and is confined to a wheelchair through a touching moment when Mira helps care for him by cutting his hair. 

The name Agapito means “beloved” or “lovable”. Although this is the name of the bowling alley (Agapito Duckpin Bowling Center), it is also the very heartbeat of the short and the community of workers employed there. It’s clear from the beginning, whether it is dealing with an angry patron who is refusing to leave, helping with end-of-day cleaning tasks, or hosting Junior, this is a community of found family who have each other's backs. 

This is epitomized in the haunting and surreal performance of a song and dance by the staff entitled “Go Forth.” The song's chant builds as a stunning choreography explodes with a physical and metaphorical manifestation of support. Through lifting each other up and pushing each other forward, the short further embraces into the theme that Junior is beloved and has both a sibling and a community that supports him. 

The following and final scenes feel like whiplash as we are thrown back into a reality we as a viewer had almost forgotten about. The short ends on a crushing note, both physically and emotionally. The camerawork, again, shines as the scene plays out through the peephole the staff use to see the bowlers from the back. 

Overall, Agapito is a mesmerizing ode to the power of community and shows the value of having a found family that will bandage you up on your hard days and make you feel beloved. 

Review by: Brandon MacMurray

Water Girl, dir. Sandra Desmazières

If you are a regular at TIFF, or simply a documentary fan in general, you may have seen last year's documentary The Last of the Sea Women that had its world premiere at TIFF before heading to AppleTV. If you haven’t seen it, it's a documentary exploring the culture of the haenyeo, a group of South Korean fisherwomen who’ve been harvesting seafood from the bottom of the ocean for centuries and how the tradition is endangered by worsening pollution and an aging population of divers. Sandra Desmazières’ Water Girl is a stunning hand-drawn portrait of what appears to be this very same (or highly similar) culture.

If the name Sandra Desmazières’ sounds familiar, you may remember her animated short Flowing Home, which was shortlisted for the 94th Academy Awards 4 years ago. It was in fact that short along with the other 14 animated shorts on that shortlist that kicked off my love for short film. They drew me into the world of animation and the various styles that could be accomplished through the medium.

Although there is no dialogue in Water Girl, the short uses a mix of nostalgia and memory as a narrative device to show change over time. There isn’t necessarily a clear narrative timeline in the linear structure as it jumps through multiple time periods across the protagonists life. However, it paints a true picture of what memory is like, piecing together bits of what is most emotional and important to you, and letting the gaps in the story fall to the wayside. Sometimes memories are hard to grasp on to, like fish swimming and slipping through your hands, or foggy like the depths of the sea. These physical likenesses translate well to the story, making the idea of remembering the past ever more realistic. 

We all have memories that we hold on to. Some things never change, like the feelings you have for the love of your life, even when that person is gone. Or the sting of remembering the desire you had to bear a child amid an inability to and the jealousy that accompanies watching others experience parenthood. Although your feelings and thoughts may stay the same, time is as steadfast as ever. Your body grows older and so does the world around you. 

Society has come to a point where it is careless about the environment. Trash pollutes the oceans and the sea-life is not what it was, no longer vibrant but oftentimes grey and dying. This is seen through her our protagonists' memories of diving over time as she finds, time and time again, the ocean floor littered with garbage. In one of the many gorgeously animated scenes she encounters a whale, weighed down by trash discarded by humans. 

Water Girl is a short that teaches you to age with grace even when the world does not and to cling desperately onto the memories and the people that are dear to you. 

Review by: Brandon MacMurray