MDFF Selects: Student Film Showcase 2025 (Part I)

By C.J. Prince

There’s an inherent newness when it comes to watching short films by students, as they often represent an emerging filmmaker’s first step forward in their artistic pursuits. The original Student Film Showcase, which ran from 2004 to 2012, provided ample opportunity for discovering new perspectives, proven by the fact that names like Brandon Cronenberg, Jacquelyn Mills, and MDFF founders Dan Montgomery and Kazik Radwanski screened their first works in the Showcase. With their relaunch of the Student Film Showcase, MDFF Selects creates a full circle moment in supporting the next generation of emerging filmmakers. 

Whether narrative, documentary, or experimental, the short films in this relaunched edition inspired questions around what we see, whose point of view we’re observing from, and the complex, ever-shifting nature of one’s own perception. While the films present their own distinctive visions, they also share an understanding of the limitations of subjectivity and an openness to how perspectives can change and grow over time.

In Arian Salarian’s French-language Novice, 17-year-old Lina (Marguerite Cap) meets an unnamed man (Samuel Pelchat) in a mall parking lot to steal a car. She tells the man it’s her first time doing this, and his pointed questions on whether or not she’ll chicken out only make her anxious demeanor all the more apparent. In this first sequence, Salarian’s use of close-ups and quick cuts places us in Lina’s stressed state of mind as she struggles against the risks of getting caught. In the second half, Salarian jumps ahead to find Lina in the days after the crime, and the film opens up to observe her in wider shots while switching to a more deliberate, measured pace. As we learn more about Lina’s motivation for the theft, along with a wrinkle involving her relationship to the victim of her crime, Novice shifts from the immediacy of Lina’s actions to how she will carry the weight of her guilt for the rest of her life. 

The intertwined and combative relationship between a mother and daughter forms the crux of Annie Liu’s Lost in Distance, which follows shy Chinese student Yan (Cindy Zhang) during her first year of university in British Columbia. Between Yan’s introverted nature and the adjustment to a new country, the already difficult task of building her independence becomes even harder with the surprise arrival of her overbearing mother (Yue Xiao), who immediately takes up residency in her daughter’s one-bedroom apartment. Liu’s precise compositions frame Yan within doorways, corridors, and windows that box her in, and these borders around her double as lines separating Yan from her mother, often within the same shot. 

But Liu also takes time to focus on Yan’s mother, who finds herself constrained by the culture shock of living in Canada and trying to find work. Liu’s framing takes on a different meaning when focused on Yan’s mother; isolated by circumstance, her emotional dependency on Yan is all the more apparent. After Yan lashes out at her mother over her domineering behaviour, the rupture changes how both women see each other, and the film closes on them in the same frame, without any barriers between them. While they come away hurt by conflict, they emerge with a better understanding of each person’s needs and the melancholy compromises required to fulfill them. 

Lucia Fella Pellegrino’s I’ll Try to Explain It dives into the muddy waters of perspective and identity via a process-oriented blend of fiction and non-fiction. It opens with a lesbian filmmaker (Auguste Kociuba) explaining the concept of her project to the camera. In response to a recurring dream in which she reunites with her ex-boyfriend from high school, she reached out to her ex to convince him to star in a re-enactment of the dream. She doesn’t know what specific outcome she wants from this experiment, although she hopes it might give her some insight as to why she keeps dwelling on her past heterosexual relationship.

Pellegrino cuts between behind-the-scenes footage on the day of filming the dream and interviews with the queer crew members, who offer their own insights on the knotty nature of their feelings toward men in a patriarchal, heteronormative world. While the documentary element is entirely constructed, I’ll Try to Explain it credits its screenplay to the testimonials of at least a dozen individuals, and Pellegrino’s merging of the blurred lines between fact, fiction, and identity creates a relatable expression around the messiness of figuring oneself out.

Compiled from over six years of photographs, Radin Khodaddi’s Gorg o Mish (Twilight) weaves together documentation of his travels and experiences as a sensorial act of recall. A flurry of images rushes by, some of them from the same period of time but split up into fragmented, blurry jump cuts that capture birds, trees, farms, and fields. The rapid editing makes it impossible to settle on one particular moment, creating an experience akin to remembering the past in pieces and impressions. 

As the film’s hectic patterns set in, and scenes of flowing water transition to a darker, urban setting in the second half, the editing begins to emphasize the film’s absences. Jump cuts force the eyes to create illusions, filling in the blanks between each image, while shots of reflective surfaces provide distorted representations of their surroundings. Khodaddi’s film takes direct aim at the fallibility of memory and perception, a point he cleverly underlines by closing Gorg o Mish (Twilight) on himself, reflected on a window where he aims his camera.

The Student Showcase closes with Eva Phillips’ Wake, a documentary about the filmmaker and their late grandfather Thomas, who had Alzheimer’s and passed away in 2018. Phillips opens their film with audio of them interviewing their mother over a shot of mountains at dawn. While they discuss memories of Thomas playing with a young Phillips, their mother reveals how she saw these moments as an insight into how he must have been with her as an infant. As Phillips learns this new information, the rising sun peeks through the mountains, lighting up the frame.

The title Wake has a double meaning, both in the film’s observance and tribute to its deceased subject and the expanded perspective Phillips develops about their grandfather through the making of the film. Primarily using interviews with family members, played over serene landscape shots, Philips learns more about their grandfather and, in turn, dislodges his memory from the fixed, immovable perception normally associated with death. This feeling takes form through the use of animated family photos, where people and objects in each image shift back and forth to complement the audio of Phillips’ relatives recalling how Thomas liked to take his grandkids outside to play. Wake ends on a hopeful note, as Phillips begins to see loss from a different perspective, in which the past can exist and carry on for those of us still in the present.

MDFF Selects: Student Film Showcase 2025 (Part II)

By Laura Kim

This year’s Student Film Showcase expresses human desire in its rawest forms: the desire to understand and, in turn, be understood. The interaction between the self and the world initiates a struggle between perceiving and being perceived. Between the struggles of identity, adulthood, and mortality, will the individual survive, or will the world consume them?

For director Han Liu, the world is one bedroom. Congratulations, It’s A Girl is a complex undertaking of family dynamics that centres on a woman in between generations, Hong (Ruth Huong), who is both a daughter and a new mother. Set almost entirely in Hong’s bedroom, everyone lives within and is framed by the structures of the house, societal values, and the One Child policy. While her mother (Bo Hong) and husband (Yi-Jin Qin) can enter and leave, Hong stays in her bedroom. The ambient threat of the One Child Policy comes to bear on Hong and her daughter when her own mother devises a plan to swap the baby girl for a boy. Subverting the family’s lack of physical affection, Hong’s world closes in on the impact of touch, on the baby girl or, in her absence, on the swaying crib. Interjecting the climactic conflict are intense close-ups of the crib persistently rocking in the aftermath of every action: when the baby is taken, held close, and placed back in her bed. 

While a bedroom can consume the world, Faith Montoya’s Mirror presents a bedroom that can expand in its potential. In the aptly named film, Jay’s (Reyhaneh Nematinejed) biggest fear is the reflective object itself, but also the (false) image it produces for others to see. Jay turns to their school poem assignment to express their frustrations and discomfort with gender dysphoria. While Jay struggles to be perceived as they wish to be, Montoya’s direction invites spectators to perceive them as they are, both in the handheld shakiness in moments of fear and isolation and in the close-up warmth of spaces turned safe with love and acceptance. In Jay’s attempts to recite their poem, whether into the mirror or to their class, silence often overrides them. But in their bedroom, in the barrier between the inside/outside of the rest of the house, decorated with Jay’s taste (softly-lit fairy lights, posters, and CDs), they successfully recite the complete poem. Bravery doesn’t have to be loud; even when quiet, it is still heard. Mirror is a thoughtful contemplation of how the body—like a poem, like a bedroom—expresses the self. 

Can the world outside our rooms be the mirror we desire? Grant Earl MacIntosh’s Sydney takes us on a poignant and humorous journey to find out. Living with his mother (Jennifer Allen-Barron), Sydney (Jeremy Armstrong) is a directionless 32-year-old who doesn’t (or cannot) do his laundry, keep his car-washing job, or pay for lunch without his card getting declined. MacIntosh introduces Sydney as a contradiction to the world around him, especially the rental home he lives in with his mother, adorned with lace curtains, can-do mantras (“Together Life is Good”), and family memorabilia. Even outside, the city sarcastically reflects an amalgam of contradictory messages that underscore Sydney’s state of stuckness and the film’s brutally honest treatment of his character. Sydney exists between the two extremes of the city’s signs: the street art that boasts “LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE” and a “TOTALLY FUCKED” sign on a TV lying on the side of the road. He is neither of these; he is in between. Through shaky footage, tight zoom-ins, and extreme close-ups, Sydney is an intimate character study of humility and nearly wasted potential amidst the city’s expansive yet claustrophobic environment. The city traps Sydney in the tightly shot apartment of his potential buyer, Arnold (Matt Burton), for the “TOTALLY FUCKED” TV. Amidst the tense family dynamics of unit 209, the buyer’s young son (Jamie MacDonald) laughs playfully with his mother (Reilly MacDonald)—quickly intercut with shots of Sydney and his own mother. Sydney finds himself reflected in the world around him, even for just a flicker of (screen) time, a brief reprieve before heading home.

In Cassidy Cooper’s animated The Killing of the Sheriff, the Old Sheriff (Connor Bushoven) is not lost, but not at home either. The wild west not only reflects its dwellers but also consumes them with promises of authority, power, and hubris. Forced into retirement and desperate to hold onto his authority, the Old Sheriff takes any means necessary to stay in power—even if this means a shootout on horseback, an outbreak of fisticuffs, and an ominously effortless murder. Staring out into the sunset, what does it mean to say goodbye to a life of justice? For the Old Sheriff, retirement is worse than death; stillness is worse than survival. In Cooper’s film, the wild west is the feeling of taking higher ground, being emboldened by the threat of mortality, and being the one (and only one) in power. The wild west consumes our protagonist, until he is the setting: unforgiving, stubborn, and tough. Though there is a killing, there is no death. Just like the never-ending frontier, the Old Sheriff lives on. 

Choosing to sit in the aftermath of death, Zoe Zhou’s We Are Happy Fish is a creative, imaginative, and innovative story of two kids, a nihilistic girl and a child robot, who journey to Princess Mountain to revive a dead pet fish. Endlessly playful in form, the film moves like the “ADHD focus music” the robot kid’s father—a very Willem Dafoe-esque mad scientist—requests. Punctuated with rhythmic editing, our two protagonists’ movements are emphasized with whimsical instrumentals, and their dialogue is punctuated with extreme close-ups and canted angles. Zhou puts the spectator in numerous POVs: the kids’ claustrophobic perspective (where their parents yell “Mama will die one day” and “I made you exist”), the perspective of a knife swiftly slicing into a fish, and the perspective of the fish being eaten. Luckily, as the kids leave their parents behind, the film also allows the spectator to venture away from the awkward tension of family dynamics. Zhou plays with the contrasting tones of being a child, both the lighthearted resilience and the realizations of death. In this comedic, offbeat, brightly filled world, the new friends ask each other sticky questions: “Does [your father] really love you?” and “What is love?” The answer is a stop-motion animation final sequence that encourages curiosity and adventure. 

This student showcase presents the human potential to cultivate a home from spaces of fear and discomfort. None of these five worlds is capable of change. But the people in them are. If this world is Plato’s cave, then how beautiful it is to find love etched on the walls?