When was the last time you saw a short film in a movie theatre?
And you snobs who intentionally seek them out at your local indie theatre don’t count. Festivals don’t count either. I mean a short film you actually anticipated, stumbled upon, or saw marketing for at a commercial cinema.
For most people, the answer is probably never. Short films typically only circulate film festivals and Vimeo links. They move through the cultural ecosystem in a way that rarely intersects with traditional theatrical exhibition. The cinema, at least in the conventional sense, was never built with them in mind. And yet the institutions that govern film culture continue to behave as if it were.
If a short film hopes to qualify for major awards like the Academy Awards, or even the Canada Screen Awards, it still needs something called a qualifying run: a theatrical screening in an approved cinema for a specific number of days. Once that condition is met, the film becomes eligible for consideration. (Or you can submit your short film into an Oscar-qualifying film festival, hope it gets accepted, and if it does, hope it wins the festival’s Best Short Film award, THEN you can submit it to the Academy).
The rule comes from an archaic version of the industry, when theatrical exhibition operated as the primary conduit through which cinema reached an audience. Today it persists largely as a kind of institutional gatekeeper. The industry maintains the gesture toward theatrical legitimacy while the actual cultural life of short films unfolds somewhere else entirely.
If your answer to my earlier question was, “yes, actually, I have seen a few short films in theatres,” first of all, God bless. Second of all, it was likely a case of four-walling—a long-standing industry practice where filmmakers rent out a theatre themselves rather than being booked by a distributor. A screen is secured, a handful of seats are filled, and the qualifying run requirement is satisfied. For short filmmakers, this arrangement is rarely aspirational. Paying to rent a cinema is a hard-to-swallow line item on an already fragile production budget. But for those hoping to enter the awards circuit, it remains the most reliable way to satisfy these bygone requirements, and the alternative is usually not competing at all.
Spend enough time around film culture and its rituals begin to invite satire. Enter French Lessons, a short film by filmmakers Anna Maguire and Kyle Greenberg of Stupid Co Films. Kyle arrives for, as advertised, a French lesson with Arran Shearing and the two soon realize they are both going to the Cannes Film Festival. One is a distributor (powerful), the other a filmmaker (destitute). The same destination carries very different implications for each of them. The film is scrappy and deliberately low-key, letting the character’s small differences in status and perspective do most of the work. Greenberg and Shearing borrow just enough of that vérité earnestness to make the melodrama feel knowingly exaggerated. The simple two-hander gradually reveals itself as a caricature of the film industry’s internal stratification.
That satirical sensibility extends beyond the film itself. After several festival screenings, French Lessons recently completed a week-long “qualifying run” at East Van Vodville Cinema, a venue that reimagines theatre-going on a microscopic scale. The Vodville Cinema is a Wes Anderson wet-dream; a miniature,1:55-scale model of the former Pantages Theatre, installed inside a literal hole-in-the-wall in an East Van alleyway. Passersby can peek into the window, press play, and enjoy a quirky cinematic experience free of cost.
The Little Free Cinema was not designed as a loophole in awards eligibility rules. It’s a small, whimsical experiment in neighbourhood art exhibition. But their partnership with the Stupid Co. team and their “qualifying run” of French Lessons is a perfectly executed troll. After all, if the industry insists that a short film must technically play in a theatre to be taken seriously, then Vodville offers the most literal interpretation imaginable. This gesture feels so satisfying. A short film that subtly satirizes the strange hierarchies and gatekeepers of film culture has its theatrical run on a mouse-sized projector in an alley, where the mythology of cinema has been reduced to its simplest components: a movie, a screen, and whoever happens to stop and watch. Beautiful.
Whether or not it qualifies for anything official is almost beside the point.
Watch French Lessons online here or catch it at the Unnamed Footage Film Festival on March 27th
Visit the East Van Vodville Cinema at 1601 Venables St, Vancouver, fourth window from the alley