by Hudson Moura
The Canadian Film Fest (CFF), celebrating its 20th anniversary (March 24-29) under the slogan “Eyeballs Up,” is often described as a showcase of Canadian features—but its short-film programming is where the festival’s identity becomes most legible: compact works that take formal risks, move quickly into psychological intensity, and sketch social worlds with an economy that frequently outperforms longer formats. This year’s slate, spread across shorts preceding each feature and four dedicated shorts programmes, suggests a festival curatorial philosophy built on contrast: intimate relationship dramas alongside documentary endurance pieces, Indigenous-led audiovisual performance alongside sharply pitched genre fables.
Several shorts stand out for how they convert small premises into rigorous emotional architecture. Paula Bourgie’s Le Huard (The Loon) begins as a deceptively simple lakeside summer scenario—two longtime friends Clara (Marguerite Damour and Éléonore Loiselle) and Dodo (Éléonore Loiselle) in a family cabin, an unexpected male “guest” (Thomas Delorme as Jules) returning from childhood—then sharpens into a territorial drama of desire and possession. The film signals its metaphor early (perhaps too early): Jules’s explanation of the loon’s territoriality makes the symbolic design explicit from the start. Yet the short ultimately earns its bluntness through affective precision. It is sensitive without becoming sentimental, and it leaves an afterimage of rivalry and intimacy that feels unusually “feature-like” in its psychological depth: a compressed study of how friendship can become a habitat, and how a third presence can expose the ownership fantasies that have been disguised as closeness.
Other shorts shift the festival’s tone toward documentary intimacy and acts of devotion. Sarah Warren’s Route 138 (Road 138) follows Gaston’s 138-kilometre run on June 10, 2023, framed as a love letter to his sister Tatiana after her experience with an aggressive cancer. The premise is straightforward—endurance as tribute—but its emotional charge lies in how bodily effort becomes a language of care: a promise kept through distance, pain, and persistence. The film’s power is less in rhetorical explanation than in the clarity of its gesture: movement as a form of writing when words are insufficient.
If Route 138 offers love through endurance, Nora Burlet Dhainaut’s Tant que nous sommes immortelles (As Long as We Are Immortal) confronts violence through testimonial form. Women’s voices describe abuses over an image structured by stillness—an aesthetic of fixation that refuses distraction. The film’s tension rises as the protagonist’s attempt to speak is interrupted, and as the narrative moves toward an encounter with an ex-partner who denies the meaning of what he did. The result is a short that stages a confrontation not only between two people, but between two epistemologies: one insisting on the reality of harm, the other insisting on its erasure. It is formally severe, but that severity is coherent with its subject: the film turns the “account” itself into an ethical battlefield.
Franie-Éléonore Bernier’s Chez Ghislaine (Ghislaine’s Place) shifts the programme toward satirical social comedy rooted in a distinctly Montréal sensibility. Set around a tiny, informal home grocery run by Ghislaine for her neighbours, the film wears its influence on its sleeve: it is clearly indebted to The White Lotus—at times to the point of feeling over-quoted, from the soundtrack and the mise en scène to the overall plot machinery. Yet the short’s pleasures are real. Its humour lands, its character types feel immediately recognizable, and its tone captures something undeniably local: the frictions and small performances of neighbourhood life, the intimate absurdity of social proximity, and even that specific Montréal summer atmosphere—oppressively hot, humid, and slightly feverish—where irritations intensify and comedy becomes a survival mode.
The programme also reveals a strong interest in adolescence and precarious autonomy. Abeille Tard’s Pippa and Leo follows a teenage mother in supervised housing in Montréal who leaves after curfew with her baby and later encounters the child’s father—rendering desire, fear, and exhaustion through movement. The use of dance as expressive outlet (rather than dialogue-driven confession) is an intelligent choice: choreography becomes the body’s way of thinking when language feels inadequate. Similarly, Tim Bouvette’s Lac en Cœur (Black Water) stages a relationship conversation at a lakeside cabin, tracking how “commitment” can look like security to one partner and suffocation to the other—an argument the film refuses to settle into caricature.
Indigenous shorts deepen the festival’s thematic range by treating space, transmission, and embodiment as cinematic substance. Lindsay Chewanish’s My Grandmother’s Tipi (Nuuhkuum uumichiwaapim), produced with Wapikoni Mobile, is less a portrait in the conventional sense than a sensorial immersion: textures, sounds, cooking, and the quiet time “in-between” become the film’s true subject. Its decision to foreground work and atmosphere over explanatory psychology is not a lack; it is an aesthetic ethic—an invitation to experience cultural memory as material presence. Caroline Monnet’s Pidikwe moves in the opposite direction of kinetic intensity: an audiovisual whirlwind of intergenerational Indigenous women whose traditional and contemporary dance blurs film and performance. Costumes and silhouettes fold past and future into the same motion, producing symbolism through bodies rather than through didactic narration.
Genre, too, appears as a serious mode rather than a mere diversion. Daniel Durandleau’s Winkie plays like a forest fable: a child’s father is gravely injured, a mysterious creature intervenes, and the child’s life is transformed. The film’s premise is archetypal, but its emotional orientation—love and protection—suggests why genre remains useful in shorts: it can carry moral and affective weight without requiring extensive exposition.
Alongside these Québec-leaning highlights, CFF’s broader national programming (as indicated in the festival announcement) reinforces the shorts’ diversity of tone and region, from the romance-inflected Wayside to the rural fragility of A Tale of Ira Abbott, from the documentary portraiture of Portraits to competition-origin shorts like I Am Pleased. In aggregate, the shorts reveal the festival’s strongest achievement: they treat “Canadian cinema” not as a single identity, but as a set of forms—documentary, fable, performance, social realism—through which Canadian filmmakers test how much complexity can be carried in a brief duration. At its best, this short-film programme does exactly what the anniversary rhetoric promises: it asks audiences to look up, lean in, and recognize that the boldest ideas in a festival are often the ones that arrive in the smallest packages.
When: March 24-29
Schedule: Check it here
Where: Scotiabank Theatre Toronto