T24

What would happen if I had to bail off a streetcar one day, hike through The Don Valley to get home and make do on just five tokens, a bag of food from The Big Carrot, and a Drake CD. Tonight, we attempt to answer the question.

Well, sort of.

This evening, The Toronto Youth Short Film Festival will be presenting films submitted for their sixth annual T24 Project. The project is akin to a filmmaking 100M dash: filmmakers are given 24 hours to envision, write, shoot, edit, and deliver a short film. Films can be no shorter than 6 minutes, no longer than 9 minutes, and all team members must be between the ages of 18 and 28. Finally, the subject matter has to specifically address the challenge question: “What a ‘Toronto apocalypse’ would be like”

It has been a bitterly winter here in the city, so it’s conceivable that the T24 competitors already got a leg up on envisioning the city as a desolate wasteland. But not ones to shy away from interesting ideas, filmmakers have approached “ApocalT.O.” from some interesting angles.

If there’s an overarching theme to the films that will screen tonight, it’s the value of contact. The shorts look at what we are willing to endure to connect with other people during times of isolation, and how far we’ll go to keep those connections. There are questions about what role social media would play in a catastrophic event, and even how we’d process the concept of an apocalypse being sexual in nature (I dare not explain). One entry titled PEACHES even features a girl who finds echoes of the connections she once shared by pouring her heart out to the lens of her video camera.

Looking around on the average subway ride home, one sees so many people nose-down in their various electronic gizmos and gadgets, connecting with everyone except the people physically around them. Watching these films, one gets the sense that all of those people would find themselves missing a great deal if those people weren’t physically around them anymore.

The project urges the filmmakers to incorporate Toronto’s landscape into their twisted tales. None of the filmmakers had the time or the resources to mimic the opening moments of The Walking Dead using The Gardiner Expressway (though that would be a cool visual), but many of them find interesting ways to capture isolation in this bustling city. many a lonely alley, and abandoned corridor are put to good use. Personally, I’ve always found the great hall of Union Station rather haunting when it’s empty, and it would appear as though one or two of this year’s filmmaker’s agree. What’s most interesting though is the landmark that makes the most appearances in the films. It’s not the setting one would expect, and considering it’s one of Toronto’s newest pieces of infrastructure, its novelty works in its favour.

As it turns out, the question of “What would a Toronto Apocalypse feel like?” has a common answer: It wouldn’t matter. It would feel just like a Montreal apocalypse, a Vancouver apocalypse, a Tokyo apocalypse, a Rome apocalypse, or a Sydney apocalypse. It is the sort of event that would make neighbourhood and nationality irrelevant. Our passports would become redundant as we would all be identified only as “survivors”.

In a small way that’s comforting. After all, it’s been a very divisive few years in Toronto. It’s good to see that something could bring us all together.

Toronto Youth Shorts is screening the completed shorts tonight at Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave) at 7:30 pm. You can purchase tickets at the door for $10. For more information on the T24 challenge, check out the website here.