Last night's shorts on death were not for everyone. But really, since we all have limited time on this planet, it's not that disturbing to contemplate all the emotions that go along with it.
Setting the bar for the evening, if not the whole festival, was Pedro Pires' Danse Macabre. If death has beauty, you will find it in between each riveting 35 mm frame of Danse Macabre. Taking a modern twist on the medieval tale intended to remind us of how fragile our lives are, Danse Macabre is a stunning and morbid ballet set to opera where a poetic, flowing and graceful body moves postmortem. It offers paralyzing feelings of sorrow, awe, shock and self-reflection. This film is such a masterpiece it won best Canadian short ($10,000) at the Toronto Film Festival on September 19.
Each film approached the subject differently and many toyed with the way children think about death, or rather, how they frequently ignore it: Gone Fishing and Miracle Fish.
The two funniest films about death were the U.K.'s animated Surprise Demise of Francis Cooper's Mother and The Funeral from the U.S., which nearly laughed me right out my squeaking Globe cinema chair.
