ON SCREEN
What: 16th Annual Vancouver Island Short Film Festival
Where: visff.com
When: Friday and Saturday, July 23-24, 7 p.m.
Tickets: By donation
The Vancouver Island Short Film Festival will bring 14 films from across the world to Vancouver Island viewers for two days of virtual screenings this weekend.
Seven short films over two programs will be streamed Friday and Saturday through visff.com, on a by-donation basis. The Nanaimo-based festival will showcase a mixture of animation, drama, comedy, and documentaries at its 16th annual event, from as far away as China, Mexico, Iran, and Japan.
Streaming films with a global scope means the will have an international audience, which is an unexpected upside of staging a film festival at the tail-end of a global pandemic, said festival director Hilary Eastmure. “Anyone from anywhere in the world can tune in and watch the festival. It opens up the possibility of a larger audience, and makes the event a lot more accessible. We’re happy to have people watching these films, because they are really incredible this year.”
Submissions from Victoria (All-In Madonna; Cool Affections; Ohrwurm), Comox (Before the Beauty is Gone), and Mill Bay (Barrier) are among the films in competition this year, but favourtism didn’t play into the decision when it came to local content, Eastmure said. The locally-made films stand squarely alongside the other entries, which were selected from 72 submissions from 10 countries.
All films at the festival are uniformly excellent, despite some being made amid the pandemic, she added. “A film that you make in isolation may not be as high quality as one shot and edited pre-pandemic, but a lot of filmmakers saw the opportunity to make something smaller on their own power. We have a good mix of comedies, documentaries and dramas from different countries, so it’s a nice balance.”
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