If you wanted to scout Vancouver’s future indie feature directors, a good place to start would be the fourth annual Vancouver Short Film Festival.
The short-drama format gives directors a chance to hone their visual storytelling skills and experiment, building their chops to the point where they’re comfortable in long-form dramas. Among the 21 short films screening at this year’s festival (Nov. 15-16 at the Vancity Theatre) are films by several directors with their sights set on making the leap to features.
Those include the well-travelled shorts Beauty Mark, from director Mark Ratzlaff, about a miserable pre-teen pageant queen (Taya Clyne) who takes drastic steps to wake up her oblivious stage mother (Christina Cox); Under the Bridge of Fear, director Mackenzie Gray’s noir love letter to an imagined 1940s Vancouver, with David Lewis as a hard-boiled detective on the trail of a Sapphic mystery; and director Jeremy Lutter’s Floodplain, with Cameron Bright and Sarah Desjardins as a rural teen couple at a crossroads.
I’ve also seen director Carleen Kyle’s The Weather Girl, starring Johannah Newmarch (she’s also featured in Gray’s short) as an unemployed broadcaster who makes a captive audience of a pair of door-to-door evangelists.
As well, the festival is holding a screening of B.C.-made web series, including episodes of the action-drama Hitman 101, the mock-doc The Acrtress Diaries, and the retro superhero The True Heroines.
There are other intriguing titles on the festival roster that I haven’t seen. Check here for film and schedule information, and to buy tickets.
