by Hudson Moura
TIFF’s Short Cuts 2026 Programme 01 brings together six films that are very different in tone and form, but each works by concentrating a larger emotional or social world into a very limited running time. Some are comic, some disturbing, some intimate, and some politically grounded. The strongest entries are those that use the short form not simply to compress a story, but to create a distinctive visual or emotional experience.
Skinny Boots — Romain F. Dubois
Romain F. Dubois’ Skinny Boots is an energetic Montreal-set short built around a young pickpocket whose personal and financial problems become entangled with the responsibility of looking after his younger cousin. The film has the rhythm of an urban caper, with a very mobile camera, grainy images, and a loose physical energy that suits the instability of the characters’ lives.
What makes the film more interesting than a simple story of theft is the way possession gradually becomes both material and emotional. Objects matter, debts matter, but so do relationships, affection, and the question of what one person can really “owe” another. The dynamic between the two boys gives the film much of its charm, and Montreal is not merely a backdrop but part of the film’s restless movement. The direction is lively, tactile, and very organic.
Rating: 4.2/5
Untitled Woman — Camille Summers-Valli
Untitled Woman is one of the strongest films in the programme, anchored by an excellent Julianne Nicholson as a middle-aged woman trying to understand herself through an art class. The setting is ideal because drawing and looking immediately raise questions about the body, beauty, subjectivity, and the desire to be seen.
The film works as an intimate portrait of a woman confronting how she perceives herself and how others perceive her. What becomes most striking is the ending, which radically complicates the idea of beauty and forces the viewer to reconsider the assumptions built up throughout the film. The art class becomes a space where aesthetics, self-image, social judgment, and contemporary ideas of beauty all collide. The final scene is shocking and unexpected, but also very revealing of a society increasingly marked by polarization and by changing, often contradictory, ideas about representation and acceptability.
Rating: 4.4/5
When the Ground Paused — Jess Barclay Lawton
Jess Barclay Lawton’s When the Ground Paused is an unpretentious and deeply intimate documentary about early motherhood. The film follows a young mother as she reflects on her own childhood wounds while trying to become the kind of attentive and nurturing parent she herself may have lacked.
Its greatest strength is the extraordinary naturalness of the relationship between mother and baby. At moments, the film feels almost fictional because the intimacy is so carefully observed and the young mother’s presence is so compelling that the line between documentary reality and performance becomes difficult to distinguish. That ambiguity is not a weakness; it is precisely what makes the film remarkable. The short captures motherhood not as an abstract theme but as a daily negotiation between tenderness, exhaustion, memory, and self-reinvention.
Rating: 3.5/5
The End — Niki Lindroth von Bahr
Niki Lindroth von Bahr’s The End is a light, absurdist stop-motion comedy set in an airport as a group of animal and insect characters wait through an impending apocalypse. Featuring voices by Alexander Skarsgård, Noomi Rapace, and others, the film uses the airport as a perfect setting for contemporary absurdity.
Since airports have become increasingly controlled, surveilled, and ritualized spaces, they offer a natural environment for exaggeration. Security, waiting, bureaucracy, strange encounters, and incompatible personalities all coexist in a kind of institutional no-man’s-land. The use of animals makes the whole situation even more incongruous, and the film occasionally moves toward metaphysical reflection, but always through nonsense and humour. It is playful, inventive, and deliberately unpretentious.
Rating: 3/5
The Highway — Yung Chang
Yung Chang’s The Highway is the most disturbing film in the programme. It begins from a relatively simple situation—an affluent businesswoman drives past the aftermath of a hit-and-run—but gradually destabilizes her sense of reality.
What makes the film effective is the incongruity between the character’s reactions and what is happening around her. The world starts to feel slightly wrong, and that dislocation produces a surreal, unsettling atmosphere. The film became even more interesting after Chang’s explanation during the TIFF Q&A, because its disturbing quality clearly depends less on conventional suspense than on the way reality itself seems to lose coherence. It is a short film that creates unease not by explaining too much, but by allowing the viewer to remain inside a situation that never quite makes sense.
Rating: 3/5
Fried Chicken & Strip Checkers — Ophelia Harutyunyan
Ophelia Harutyunyan’s Fried Chicken & Strip Checkers is perhaps the most grounded and historically specific film in the programme. Centred on a brother and sister and their visit to their imprisoned father, the film gradually reveals a larger context of family strain, corruption, and political difficulty in Armenia.
The film feels deeply personal, which Harutyunyan confirmed during the TIFF Q&A by explaining its basis in real experience. That personal connection gives the short an unusual emotional density. The historical moment is very specific, but the family dynamics remain immediately accessible. The film is beautifully shot, the performances are strong, and the characters feel fully inhabited despite the short running time. It is a remarkable little piece about how political and institutional pressures enter domestic life and reshape the future of a family.
Rating: 4/5
Taken together, Short Cuts 2026 Programme 01 is strongest when the filmmakers trust specificity: a Montreal street, an art classroom, a young mother and child, an airport populated by odd characters, a road after an accident, or an Armenian family trauma memory. The programme moves between humour, intimacy, social criticism, surrealism, and historical memory, but its best films understand that a short does not need to explain everything. It only needs to create one world strongly enough that we continue thinking about it after it ends.