Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Shorts at Hot Docs

Hot Docs screens some delightful shorts at the Festival.  There have been good ones over the years, but this year, I've particularly enjoyed the ones I've seen.

Like a Breath
This just might be my favourite short ever at Hot Docs.  A young woman alternates between performing wonderful modern dance and taking a cornucopia of pills and injections for her cystic fibrosis.  The sound track consists of her laboured breathing.  This 5 minute film really grabbed me.

Pouters
This film was a hilarious 17-minute romp through waste ground near Glasgow, following 'doo men' the dedicated, intense men who fly pigeons for sport.  The idea is to have your hen attract a rival's doo, the male, to your doocot, and then pull a net trap over the doo to capture him.  In an area with high unemployment, it's a cheap sport for people with lots of time on their hands.  Almost as hilarious as the antics of the 'doo men' was the need for subtitles for the thick Glaswegian accent - even with the subtitles there, I sometimes found it hard to separate out the words.  (For more information on 'doo fleein' see this report in the Scotsman.)

Yellow Sticky Notes
8 minutes.  15 sticky notes.  15 to-do lists.  15 animators.   What a great idea!  And what a rich variety of animations of their to-do lists, mixing practicality and whimsy.

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