Adam Keresztes — Lead Shorts Programmer for the Calgary International Film Festival — has a funky method of curating.
“A package of films has some thematic current that’s running through all these films, and they get sort of lumped into 90-minute-to-two-hour chunks,” says Keresztes. CIFF will present these “packages” alongside feature-length presentations. They always have a documentary package, a late-night horror one, and so on, though several themes are up in the air each year.
When grouping the packages by theme, Keresztes will come up with temporary names for each package for internal use… and he picked song titles from a single musician for the last three years. “It’s not like you choose the artist and then you program the films to the artists,” he says. “You’ve got to find someone whose songs can be pretty malleable to the curation,”
Past artists he’s used include Bob Marley, Solange Knowles, and Wu-Tang Clan. With this year’s Y2K marketing and theming, he’s gone with an early aughts classic: Christina Aguilera.
It’s an off-beat approach to one of the more off-beat parts of CIFF. With all the micro-content we are algorithmically surrounded by, a series of selected short films in a theatre presents an intriguing alternative. “You can go on YouTube and watch short films for literally years of your life,” Keresztes says. “But… our programmers know our audience. We’re researching, going to other festivals, looking at all these other films and trying to bring the best of what we think our audience will like. [We’re] trying to build some rapport so that audiences trust our curation… and trust in our process.” Like naming packages after bangin’ songs.
You can also experience a shot of home-grown talent with the Alberta Spirit package, a rapid-fire selection of locally produced short films that CIFF programs every festival. One such film this year is ALL IS NOT FORGOTTEN, a Scorsese-esque thriller directed by local filmmaker gbohunmi. The film features Toronto-Calgary transplant actor Colin Munch, and for him, it’s a chance to view our city in a different light.
“We’re so saturated with American movies about the mythology of American cities,” he says. “Canada doesn’t really have that, even though our cities have so much character. Toronto, Montreal, Calgary, Vancouver, and Halifax… all of these cities should be as iconic as any big American city. So it was cool to make a movie that’s like a New York movie [set] in Calgary.”
A crime movie shot guerilla-style and set in Cowtown — Why not? Short films present a one-shot chance to explore anything… and do it quickly. “It’s a whole movie: It’s just shorter,” says Munch. “If you can get a satisfying narrative experience in a five-minute movie or 20 minutes, what’s the difference?”
The Calgary International Film Festival takes place from September 19 to 29. Check out the lineup and get tickets at ciffcalgary.ca.
