TIFF 2017: Short Cuts

Alone and far from home, The Kid makes his way through a strange city looking for the means to get through his day. Surrounded by predators, he is forced to make compromises merely to survive; his life of exile grows one day longer.

In a nameless Chinese city, a mother with her daughter missing refuses to go gentle into this good night.

Individual identities disappear and arise in transit space. Everything is in constant motion and everyone potentially suspicious.

On Christmas Eve, 1968, in a Scottish coastal town, a debt collector goes to work to avoid confronting his wife's worsening psychosis at home.

A Palestinian couple resorts to an unusual way to conceive as the husband is detained in an Israeli jail where visits are restricted.

When a pet bird keels over in its cage, suspicion naturally falls on the cat in the apartment.

Charles is different, a boy with grown-up problems. At home he has to care for his mother who appears to be ill, and at school he is bullied. Longing for a normal family life, he escapes into a parallel world filled with frogs.

A young woman returns to her home town after the death of her father. As a single daughter, she must empty the house of her father, who was a compulsive accumulator (or hoarder). She will then revisit, through the various stacks of objects, the life of her father, trying to find out what her specific place is among this multitude of memories.

Deep inside the jungle, a group of teenage girls are being kept under supervision. Despite abandonment and hostility, Damiana hopes she can get in touch with her father.

The last habitants of a village refuse to let themselves sink into oblivion.

A daughter's fantasy of her mother, elusively portrayed at her own magical house and garden. The mother's image and voice are deconstructed and assembled again into an intergenerational sonnet, reflecting the everlasting experience of being a woman, in a world of constant feminine evolution.

On a hot summer day, a taciturn teen boy makes his way through the hustle of Cairo - with a baby in tow. His arrival at a hospital reveals the turmoil beneath his muted expression.

A progressive elementary school's "parenting class" takes an unexpected dramatic turn.

In this raw and graceful testimony of intersectional womanhood, a trans girl has to care for her Italian grandmother. She assumes that her Nonna disapproves of her - but instead discovers a tender bond in their shared vulnerability.

A First Nations boy struggles to deal with the death of his grandmother, but finds a connection with her through an old VHS camcorder.

The VHS footage of this video, found in a storage locker, depicts a disturbing and surrealist look at the real life 'Krusty The Clown Show'.

A world-weary and reluctant bank robber is torn between loyalties on the eve of his partner's next big job.

Previously dedicated to her job at a soon-to-close gas station, the subject devotes her last night of employment to some questionable acts, thereby reflecting the increasingly anarchic nature of the society around her.

An obsessive choreographer on a creative retreat with her toddler awakens a fairy corpse with disturbing intentions

As the end of her life approaches, an old woman encounters a strange spirit from a nearby forest.

A brief story of a guy who's obsessed about having sex with ETs.

Tehran 2017, three days in life of two young undocumented Afghani brothers, recently immigrated to Iran, who see their destiny take a turn just as a better life seems to open up to them.

Largely left on their own due to their parents' jobs in other cities, a sensitive teenager and her kid sister must rely on themselves if they hope to glean anything from the life lessons they encounter.

Marlon, 14 years old, is visiting her mother in jail for the first time since her imprisonment. The young girl, protected by her family and relatives, stubbornly believes that her mother is still her childhood heroine...

West Berlin, 1989. Manny Jumpcannon prowls his dingy apartment, phoning various degenerates from his past. He's hoping for some uncertain vindication but the ensuing conversations only reveal his own sordid history of deceit.