MDFF Selects: Student Film Showcase 2026 (Part I)

By Burak Batu Tunçel

No story exists in a vacuum. When a filmmaker points their camera to tell a story, they inevitably reimagine or reshape the world that hosts that story, whether it is what’s included in the frame and what’s left out or, what was already there and what should be. 

One can find parallels between an emerging filmmaker and a young adult, both aiming to find a unique voice in a world that’s already there—sometimes through the means of reduction and sometimes through reinvention. While it’s no shock that these kinds of people overlap within the identities of those who have contributed to the Student Film Showcase, it’s significant that all of these filmmakers use their cameras to lay out a distinct and complex sense of world building to examine, express, or observe how their characters will exist within them.  The camera can be a magnifying glass that examines the small things that make up a culture one is born to, other times, it can depict turbulence or interference to one’s private concept of normalcy.

The traditional-turned-discordant music that opens up Khê Lăng Yên-Khê’s Troubled Happiness is almost an aural thesis of what the audience is about to see. As the camera sweeps through traditional Chinese decorations in a house in Canada, culture becomes the key for world building here. But like the score, culture also manifests itself within the form of a clash, between an older and younger generation. We find Sunny, a young girl, in a sombre mood and the cause of her distress unravels through conversations with her mother whom she lives with. Her betrothal ceremony, as arranged by her mom, is a haunting precedent for the unwilling Sunny and the conflicting point-of-views these two women have are strategically employed through literal point-of-view shots that dramatically underline both the socioeconomic and personal aspects of their reasonings. 

The camera similarly turns its gaze onto physical and mental artifacts of culture, albeit more experimentally, in Jhonathan Varela Gonzales’ Fuga 22. This time, the spectator is caught up between vivid memories of a childhood in Honduras and immigration to Canada. While perhaps categorizable as a semi-documentary, Gonzales seeks personal, sensory poetry in the environment rather than sticking to what was already there before him. While the texture of the mini-DV camcorder may evoke a universal nostalgia for those who grew up with the technology, its high-contrast and popping colours are so visually unusual to come by today and in the rest of the program that it inadvertently recalls the different ways an artist can perceive the world. 

Analogue technologies—this time more sinisterly—also accompany the characters from childhood to adulthood through the form of the timeless, uncanny TV talent show in Ruth Tesfahun’s Dustheads where men wearing Max Headroom-by-the-way-of-Lynch masks discreetly observe two brothers putting on a live slapstick show for the program, only to sadistically rejoicing when their act turns into a display of self-harm. Dustheads makes a good deal out of theatrics, from its sneakily empty auditorium setting to the determinedly choreographed clown performance on display, but the type of theatre it recalls most is that of Bertolt Brecht. The bizarreness of the set-up and the impossibility of pinpointing an actual setting encourage allegorical readings, especially a critically racial one, through the provocative introduction of the characters as “black men” within a “ strange dream”—but whose dream is it, and whose nightmare is it?

Nightmarish imagery is only one of the expressive techniques director Carrara Stern employs in her short Aftermath, which follows a teenager’s experience in the aftermath of sexual assault. The world in view for the protagonist has been transformed into a strange land, and a psychological cinematic language is favoured to depict how this fragile state of mind transforms the gestures of others into potential threats. The sensitive subject matter is not merely treated with a grim “what it is,” as the film’s empathetic position boldly wants to settle on “what can be done” through the gradual evolution of the relationship our protagonist has with the people around her, and also with herself. 

While so many of these films are journeys into psyches, memories and surreal somewheres, Boom! Grandpa, Boom! is about a child’s metaphysical trip to the afterlife to find his recently-deceased grandfather so that he can have him his ticket to reincarnation. While the premise may appear like a dark fairytale, there’s playful humour within the brushstrokes of the colourful animation style. Director June (Chia En) Lee’s reimagining of the great beyond sneaks in a well-meaning child’s mischief to a purgatory populated by stuck souls and giant animals. One can also argue that it’s a testament to how old habits die hard even after death—in this case, gambling!

MDFF Selects: Student Film Showcase 2026 (Part II)

By Dylan Adamson

A slight paradox: adventurous new films spring eternal from young and low-budget filmmakers; young and low-budget filmmakers are often restricted to making narrative shorts in their first years; the narrative short film, as a medium, is utterly moribund. The scourge of this medium is the “calling card film”—a short aimed at producers and financiers to demonstrate that the filmmaker is capable of handling a larger budget. However, the works in this year’s student showcase prove that the form still holds worthwhile significance, each of its limits an invitation to push creative boundaries.

L’Heure Fœtale comes courtesy of Dorothée Gingras-Bernardin at Concordia University. The short takes the form of an anecdote: Marianne (Lily Taillefer) has embarked on a solo winter camping trip, but her isolation is interrupted by a drone overhead. Per the title, she retreats into her tent, which becomes a very thoroughly illustrated metaphor for the womb. The sound design keeps us aware of the buzzing aerial threat in the distance, but L’Heure Fœtale is less a meditation on surveillance and more a character study in miniature of Marianne as she defines and renegs on the type of independence she wants. No man is an island, fortunately and unfortunately. Despite the blunt metaphor, Gingras-Bernardin’s directorial touch is light and her script unpredictable, open to mystery and possibility at every turn.

The programme’s stop motion interjection, To Burn Our Sacred House, in spite of the painstaking planning necessitated by its clay figurine actors, felt similarly capable of discovery and surprise. Lola (Alicia L’Archevêque) and Louise (Kimia Moayyed) are two teen girls, who, for circumstances that are not clarified, no longer live together. The short’s dialogue consists of their letters back and forth, mourning their youthful time spent together and trying to understand their new relationship apart; the images show two lonely clay figures in winterwear set against varied rural terrain, seemingly in western Canada. Ridd’s epistolary short does well to capture the impatience of adolescence. The minute shaking conferred by the repositioning of the clay figures seems to reflect an antsiness, mirrored by the wildly varied natural terrain that forms their backgrounds. “Running out of closing lines,” Louise signs off one letter, while the images reflect a buzzing world that awaits the two girls, whenever they’re ready.

Flicker Underneath was the programme’s lone non-narrative entry, showing for its two-and-a-half minute duration an image of an eye flickering double-exposed beneath heavily scratched, patterned, and otherwise manipulated film. There’s a youthful overabundance of energy, perhaps a different reflection of the same eagerness underpinning To Burn Our Sacred House. Fink’s short demonstrates considerable dexterity with the 16mm frame, with an interesting view to visualize the story of an eye.

Encore, Encore is a film of some ambition, buoyed by a subject of wonderful interest and its director’s keen eye. The septogenarian owner of a closing Cambodian restaurant, Pou (Khuy Racksmey), struggles to accept that his restaurant is closing on its last night. Tan’s film wears its influences on its sleeve: an upsetting karaoke performance courtesy of Edward Yang; durational shots lingering on the proprietor in denial straight out of Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). There’s something a little morose in a young person projecting feelings of regret and nostalgia onto an older man, but Tan has a knack for finding these evocative scenes of degradation: cigarette smoke filtered through neon light; a DoorDash driver arriving late in the evening, looking for the neighbouring Thai Express. 

The class of the programme hails from Capilano University: Zaman Khan’s Main Street Project. Khan’s MiniDV street scene is straight, cheap, and to the point, until it explodes into an associative field. Maria (Sophie Diebold) is an immigrant worker living in grey Vancouver who discovers a dead body in the alley outside her apartment, where it remains for days. Avoiding the youthful pitfalls of bravura camerawork and cutting, Khan’s Maria is rendered mostly in stationary long shots tracking her daily routine. She eats breakfast, peers out the window, walks to work. At work, she is seen gutting grabs, their innards spilling into a metal sink. One glimpses, in brushstrokes alternately bold and subtle, a casual, stepped-over cruelty that undergirds urban life. Restraint is the rarest of qualities in a student filmmaker, and Khan indulges but one Safdie-esque zoom into a dead fish’s eye, which is fortunately cut short. After a phone call with her estranged mother and a confrontation with the dead body, Maria arrives at some emotional revelation, communicated via a format change to 16mm and a cavalcade of associatively linked imagery: newspaper articles about murder, police documents, driver’s licenses. Its mystery is broad, and grounded in a contemporary and intimate view of real life in Vancouver. 

All in all, the programme displays the wellspring of energy emerging from Canadian film schools, with many cases where young auteurs were able to contain and harness that energy to productive ends.