SHORTS PROGRAM

SCREENING JUNE 24–27, 2021
AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE

A Q&A with the filmmakers will follow the screening

Spectres of loneliness haunt this year’s Atlantic Auteurs program. The lineup dances between liminal scenes that study home and uprootedness, movement and stillness, and the body’s entanglement with landscapes; some are hopeful, and others are full of dread.

The program opens with Ivy (dir. Sylvia Mok), delivering sweet contemplation as a young girl from Hong Kong adjusts to her new home. Endless Row of Trees (dir. Henry Colin) presents accelerating desperation trapped inside of a car as a man drives away from his problems.

A universe appears and vanishes just upon its inception in Will O’Wisps (dir. Peter de Niverville), echoing the strange sadness of ephemerality. A backyard marsh becomes a nightmare landscape in marshlands (dir. chik white), where visceral textures, banal repetition, and a devouring mud evoke quiet, psychic terror.

Slave / Servant / Human (dir. Israel Ekanem) juxtaposes the idyllic images of Nova Scotia presented by tourism campaigns with its historically entrenched racism, calling attention to the histories suppressed and erased by those idealized narratives.

Looking out a large window, A Place Called Home / The Wind (dir. Kennlin Lake Barlow) sits alone with the stillness of a frozen landscape as the light passes over it. JOLT (dir. Xavier Gould, Angie Richard) brings bodies together in dynamic motion, studying transformation, transness, yearning, and community to a pulsing techno beat.

Time is both linear and cyclical in Moon River (dir. Misha Horacek), where the poetic connection between the body, the natural world, fertility, and cycles is expressed in fluid motions. Love in Quarantine (dir. Millefiore Clarkes) closes the program with reflections on love and loneliness in our contemporary moment. It studies the journey of finding connection in isolation and dreaming of the future while managing the everyday anxieties of a seemingly perpetual present. —Gen Oliver