Film reviews: Quick takes on a quartet of standout Vancouver Short Film Festival offerings
“Introduction” brings lo-fi camp, “Everlasting” documents Vancouver’s Wing Sang history, “Tiger by the Tail” delivers disco-happy raunch, and “In the Heat” is a deadpan-dark Santa cartoon
“Introduction”
“Tiger by the Tail”
The Vancouver Short Film Festival screens at VIFF Centre from May 31 to June 2, and online from May 31 to June 9
SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL at the Vancouver Short Film Festival, celebrating its 14th edition from May 31 to June 2 at VIFF Centre (also available to view online from May 31 to June 9).
Variety is the big story here, along with high ambition. Among the festival’s 46 titles, rounded up from across Canada and organized into six programs, you’ll find a period drama set during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis (“Motherland”), a claymation horror concerning a seamstress and a parasite (“Threads”), and a healthy number of experimental works (“The Poem We Sang”).
Among the comedies, dramas, and short docs, here are four that we enjoyed a lot:
“INTRODUCTION”
June 1, 2pm
In the spirit of underground filmmaking stretching all the way back to the sixties, “Introduction” charms with its collision of lo-fi camp and Dadaist imagination. A woman’s trip to the beach is interrupted by increasingly strange characters, including a rollergirl who fries an egg on her own belly and a bodybuilding stud in a teeny bikini. This all leads to the arrival of a kind of trans deity who offers enlightenment to the perplexed beachgoer, whereupon “Introduction” rockets from its cheerfully cheap setup into a fabulous animated sequence, like it was suddenly dosed with DMT. Bruna Arbex’s film is obviously informed by contemporary gender politics, but seriously, it wouldn’t have looked out of place screening 50 years ago in a Greenwich Village cafe.
“EVERLASTING”
June 1, 2 pm
Given Vancouver’s pathological habit of erasing its own history, a film like “Everlasting” is invaluable. The Wing Sang Building at 51 East Pender Street originated as two-storey brick building built in 1889 by Chinese immigrant Yip Sang. Along with his family—he had three wives and 23 children—Yip’s business empire grew until the Wing Sang Building became a discrete community within Chinatown, housing his ever-expanding family and operations, along with a hostel for new immigrants and a school. It fell into dilapidation after the last of the Yips moved out in the ’70s, until Bob Rennie renovated the space for his own purposes, making sure to provide a home for the Canadian Chinese Museum. With such a brisk pace, this technically spotless film by Larry Chin and Sarah Ling necessarily leaves some questions behind, and Rennie will always be a polarizing figure, but all of that is resolved in a lovely sequence when Yip’s eldest granddaughter Rosalie is given a tour of her old home. Yip’s initial plans for Wing Sang faced significant obstruction by the City. It doesn’t editorialize—we can probably guess why he wasn’t granted any favours—but “Everlasting” lends the film a quietly triumphant title.
“TIGER BY THE TAIL”
June 1, 7 pm
There’s a lot of raunch in this period-set—the disco era, specifically—amorality tale, in which Hot Chicks with Guns face off over narco territory stretching between New York and West Virginia. Vancouver subs for both in a 15-minute effort that’s long on style and pretty short on plot, allowing just enough for locals like Tasya Teles, Hannah Levien, Nhi Do, and Juan Riedinger to look seedily glamorous, which is the entire point, really. Among its impressive set pieces, the best scene involves a tense meeting between a big city kingpin (queenpin?) and a hick enforcer, all tightly cowritten and directed by Sharai Rewels, which climaxes in a great gag involving a giant mirror ball. Behind the scenes are producers including the Vancouver Badass Film Festival’s David Aboussafy and the Rio Theatre’s Corinne Lea, who have done much in recent years to bring homegrown grind to the local Grindhouse.
“In the Heat”
“IN THE HEAT”
June 1, 7pm
This 17-minute cartoon concerns the fate of Santa Claus after he’s been arrested on suspicion of child murder in a gritty urban tenement. Protesting his innocence, he’s brutalized by skeptical NYC cops, as you’d expect, but refuses to call a lawyer, insisting instead on speaking to a detective with whom, the sweaty fatman says, he goes “way back.” Directed by Sam Chou and adapted from a short story by Russian “Queen of Horror” Anna Starobinets—there are elements of Slavic folklore here that you don’t see coming—“In the Heat” is pretty-much perfect, from its deadpan premise, which could have been too cutesy, to the expert timing of its twists and reveals. If the style and execution is super-slick, that’s because “In the Heat” is also something of a ringer—it was produced as part of the TV series Red Iron Road. It belongs here nonetheless, as much as it belongs on a double bill with, say, the insane 1980 classic Christmas Evil. 
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