Competition Screenings

Short Competition 1

Presented in partnership with CMF

Wednesday, September 25, 7:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema
Preceded by Opening Ceremony

Saturday, September 28, 1:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema

Film List

Short Competition 2

Presented in partnership with The High Commission of India in Canada in cooperation with the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India, and National Film Development Corporation (NFDC).

Thursday, September 26, 3:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema

Saturday, September 28, 3:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema

Film List

Short Competition 4

Friday, September 27, 11:00 am
ByTowne Cinema

Sunday, Sept 29, 1:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema

Film List

Short Competition 5

Friday, September 27, 7:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema

Sunday, September 29, 3:00 pm
ByTowne Cinema

Film List

Young Audiences 7+

Saturday, September 28, 9:30 am
OAG: Alma Duncan

Film List

Teen Audiences 13+

Saturday, September 28, 1:00 pm
OAG: Alma Duncan

Film List

Sultana’s Dream

El sueño de la sultana
Isabel Herguera | Spain, Germany, India | 2023 | 86:39
Spanish, Basque, Hindi, and Bengali with English Subtitles
14+

Inés, a Spanish artist, lives in India and stumbles upon Sultana’s Dream, a science fiction story by Rokeya Hossain in 1905. It describes Ladyland, a utopia where women rule the country while men live in seclusion and are responsible for household chores. Fascinated by the story, Inés embarks on a journey across the country to search for the one place where women can live peacefully.

“This depth that Sultana’s Dream addresses is interesting and important and has a beautiful and considerable didactic value, but what shines the most is the form. The film distinguishes itself in the way Herguera and her team tell this story of domination and transformation. With wit and a certain ironic humour, through original and fascinating visual and sound materials, symbolic colours, images, music, and sounds that evoke the depth of the film, they recreate the dreamlike world of Begum Rokeya’s story and build a whole imaginary world full of new ideas, spaces, landscapes, and characters. 

Sultana’s Dream is a film with personality and extraordinary audiovisual strength. It is a beautiful and unique film about the search for freedom, where fantasy itself affirms the transforming power of fiction and, with it, of cinema as a representation of dreams. A film that will most certainly deserve to be remembered in Spanish animation.” (Júlia Olmo, Cineuropa)

Boys Go to Jupiter

Julian Glander | U.S.A | 2024 | 90:00
14+

Something is rotten in the state of Florida. It’s the day after Christmas, and the deadness of the year hangs in the thick swampy air. Our little hero, Billy 5000, is an aimless teenager content to waste his potential and fill his days working as a delivery driver. During a routine dropoff, Billy becomes the owner and caretaker of a mysterious egg which hatches a creature from another world. Everything quickly spirals, and Billy is soon forced to make some hard choices about life, love, and the most important thing of all: money.
“Welcome to the weird world of Boys Go to Jupiter, where aliens hang out with delivery boys, juice factories house mutant fruits grown from moon rocks, and funky electronic songs lurk around every corner. This world isn’t some new planet or alternate dimension: It’s just suburban Florida. Yet in the hands of director and 3D animator Julian Glander, Boys Go to Jupiter‘s Florida becomes a strange, magical place where the absurd and the mundane co-exist as nonchalant bedfellows. Bizarre, hilarious, and boasting refreshingly distinct animation, Boys Go to Jupiter is a wonderfully absurd experience.” (Belen Edwards, Mashable)

Journey of Shadows

Reise der Schatten
Yves Netzhammer | Switzerland | 87:00
14+

A seemingly idyllic lovers’ encounter reveals itself to be the start of a genderless figure’s surreal odyssey. A dystopian universe unfolds piece by piece as the characters learn who they really are.
“Imagine a human stripped down to merely the corporeal. It has limbs and a torso, but no face, as other body parts appear only when they are interacted with. But this is no horror of faceless monstrosities. Netzhammer’s human characters grieve, ponder, and love just as profoundly as those who are fully fleshed out physically. Evoking the archetypal wooden mannequin used by artists to model human movement, these non-gendered, pink figures appear as if they could be the foundation of every character in the era of early 3D animation. In a subversion of expectations around an ultra-minimalist design, Journey of Shadows is surprisingly tender and sometimes even sexual, conveyed effectively through careful movements without the need for facial expressions or vocalizations.” (Olivia Popp, Cineuropa)

Olivia and the Clouds

Olivia & Las Nubes
Tomás Pichardo Espaillat | Dominican Republic | 2024 | 80:54
14+
Spanish with English subtitles

Somewhere in the Caribbean, the lives of four unique animated characters find themselves at a crossroads in their pursuit of love. Olivia, a young woman who resides in the countryside, reckons with the presence of her former lover. Toxicity and repression clash within the solitude of her enclosed homeland. Decades later, the story of Mauricio and Bárbara palpitates in the big city. The couple are caught by the tides of their turbulent relationship. We learn more about Bárbara, a young filmmaker who reconciles with her love life through auto-fiction animation. Her partner, Mauricio, tends to his ailing mother. His mental well-being slowly collapses under the weight of familiar obligations and the male ego. In the film’s strangest relationship dynamic, Ramón, a delusional love-sick office worker, falls in love with a plant. An absurdist romance evolves into an abusive powerplay. The chapter meticulously anchors its surrealist stimuli through the peculiarities and eccentricities of the human condition. 
Evoking the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the sensual surrealism of Haruki Murakami, Olivia and the Clouds expertly intertwines the idiosyncratic narrative vignettes through the mastery of expressionistic montage. The heart-breaking drama mixes and mingles within the multi-animator framework. Through vibrant potpourri, Olivia and the Clouds combines hand-drawn animation, stop-motion animation, Super8 footage, and other miscellaneous techniques. Tomás Pichardo Espaillat’s empathetic tribute to his grandmother lulls its viewers into a singular cerebral state. After participating in the Cineasti del Presente competition at the Locarno Film Festival last month, Espaillat’s imaginative triptych will swoon fans of adult-oriented animation through its timeless storytelling. (David Cuevas)

Flow

Gints Zilbalodis | Belgium, Latvia, France | 2024 | 84:00
14+

Amidst the beauty of its surrounding ecosystem, a black cat with kind eyes roams the hazy domain. In the serene woodland, the feline protagonist scavenges in dialogue-less solitude. In the blink of an eye, tragedy strikes. A biblical flood submerges the cat’s familiar home into a vast waterworld. On his survivalist journey through the apocalypse, the helpless feline learns to adapt by defying the rules of the natural order. Teaming up with an observant capybara, a hyperactive lemur, a boastful secretary bird, and a sociable retriever on their collective quest for a new home; the unlikely pairing learns to co-exist with their survivalist ambitions. 
After competing with his debut feature Away (2019), Latvian wunderkind Gints Zilbalodis returns to Ottawa with an important fable on the power of camaraderie during times of cataclysmic ruin. Flow revitalizes classical storytelling structures reminiscent of Aesop’s Fables, Noah’s Ark, and Life of Pi. In his maximalist 3D-rendered environments, Zilbalodis experiments with expressive cinematographic movement. The intensity of the water-bound sequences is frighteningly immersive, as the precocious cat bravely traverses the sink-or-swim terrain. Flow irresistibly entangles its viewer within the restless anthropomorphized poetry of its sprawling aquatic world. As a loose adaptation of Zilbalodis’s high-school short film Aqua (2012), Flow continues to explore the Latvian director’s noteworthy themes and wordless techniques with empowering authenticity. (David Cuevas)

Sunburnt Unicorn

Nick Johnson | Canada | 2024 | 81:00
13+

Ramshackled by the scorching heat from a hallucinogenic desert, Frankie, a precocious teen, miraculously survives a freak car accident. With a shard of debris disfiguring his forehead, the angsty teen finds himself on a dehydrated search for his missing father. Surrounded by endless sand and prickly cacti, Frankie must survive the incalescence of the unforgiving region with the aid of a wounded tortoise. On his journey, the inhabitants of the land begin to perceive the teen as a long-lost mythical being. A legend as old as time emerges from the dunes, as Frankie slowly begins to adopt the role of a false prophet. The anthropomorphized creatures who roam the land call him the unicorn—a heroic creature with the power to defy the all-mighty cactus king.
Embodying the sharp aesthetic sensibilities of early 2000’s Canadian children’s programming, Nick Johnson’s wholly original Sunburnt Unicorn delightfully subverts his macabre premise with a nuanced commentary on intergenerational divide. The harrowing climax reveals the frightening antagonist The Cactus King; a Lovecraftian creature with an insatiable character design. Sunburnt Unicorn references off-kilter adventure films from the 1980s and beyond; remixing iconography as direct inspiration from titles such as The Secret of Nimh, The Dark Crystal, The Neverending Story, and Rango. More importantly, Johnson’s debut feature resembles the long-gestating power of compelling Canadian cinema: all while reaching new heights with a haunting lyricless score from PIQSIQ’s Inuksuk Mackay and Tiffany Ayalik.

Memoir of a Snail

Adam Elliot | Australia | 94:00
14+

From Academy Award-winning director Adam Elliot (Harvie Krumpet, 2003) comes a long-awaited feature follow-up to the universally beloved OIAF 2009 Grand Prize winner, Mary and Max. This film is another potent, whimsical, and hopeful tearjerker about life’s underdogs.
Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook from Succession) is a lonely oddball with a ‘glass half full’ outlook, obsessed with collecting ornamental snails and reading. Her protective twin brother, Gilbert, is the ‘glass half empty’ type, preferring dour books and eating fire. When their sole remaining parent, a disabled alcoholic, dies, they are separated and forced into foster homes.
Grace spirals into anxiety and angst after the separation. Inspiration eventually comes in the form of Pinky, an eccentric, tap-dancing, pinkyless elderly lady who smokes cigars in the rain. Through Pinky, Grace begins to find her confidence and true self.
As with his previous works, Elliot takes viewers on an emotional journey, presenting every conceivable hardship to Grace and Gilbert. Yet, amidst each storm, there is always a glimmer of sun, a hope for rebirth, and a chance at happiness, or something close to it. (Frank Remley)