Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival: (1/31-2/8/03). (Festival Wraps).

Canada was a major presence at the 25th annual Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival--located in a picturesque medieval town north of Paris--with two special retrospective programs devoted solely to Canadian cinema. In the general screenings, 25 recent Canadian shorts were shown, several with the filmmakers present. The retrospective screenings ranged from Mes esperances en 1908 (Leo-Ernest Ouimet, 1908), a two-minute silent film made with Ouimet's children, to the NFB's classic Glenn Gould: On the Record (Wolf Koenig and Roman Kroitor, 1961), in which Gould's playing of J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto is very skillfully cut with shots of his visit to a New York recording studio. Other films recalling Canada's rich cinematic heritage were the NFB's animated gem, Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, 1949), where vividly coloured stripes and spots dance to a specially written jazz track by Oscar Peterson, and Bucherons de la Manonane (Arthur Lamothe, 1962), which faithfully depicts the almost unbeli evably tough, freezing and lonely life of the lumberjacks of northern Quebec.

This year, Canadian contemporary filmmakers seemed predominantly concerned with personal relationships. In Chopstick, Bloody Chopstick (Shawn Durr and Wayne Yung, 2001) a neurotic gay man describes his messy failed romances to his mute Asian boyfriend. Novembre (Nicolas Roy, 2001) is about sadness, despair and departure, and the NFB's Aatagonia (Nicolas Brault, 2002) uses animation to depict a vast ocean in which two birds are carried on a dark tide beyond the limits of their world. By contrast, French films in the same program dealt directly with public life. Biotope (Merwan Chabane, 2001) disturbingly compares human behaviour in the Paris Metro with that of animal wildlife, and Freedub 1 (Stephane Elmadjian, 2002) states, "animal is a man endowed with reason," and then shows endless library shots of soldiers marching toward each other from dozens of different countries.

Two Canadian shorts shared an endearing quirkiness. In Why Don't You Dance (Michael Downing, 2001), based on a 1970s short story by Raymond Carver; a young couple come upon a suburban lawn sale with the whole contents of a house spread--out, although there is no owner visible. The couple are trying out a bed when the proprietor returns bearing liquor, which he willingly shares. He accepts any offer for his furniture and soon takes to dancing with the girl rather than bothering with the sale. I asked Downing what he thought was the significance of the story, to which he replied with engaging frankness: "I'm not sure really. Like all Carver's stories. It's a bit ambiguous. For me, it's about a middle-aged man purging himself of his past. But it's very open to interpretation." Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl (Brad Peyton, 2002), from the Canadian Film Centre (which won the award for Best Soundtrack), is a lighthearted fantasy in which a young dead girl tries to come alive again. She emerges from her grave full of life, but her ghoulish appearance frightens her former chums. Her problem is not solved until she accepts her plight. I asked Peyton about the film's meaning. "It means that you have to trust yourself," he explained. It's a simple lesson a lot of us forget.

Henry Lewes is a film journalist based in England who has reported for Cindaste and Take One.