EIFF film review: Lunchbox Shorts 3.0

This year, the Edmonton International Film Festival hosted multiple collections of Lunchbox Shorts, meant to be watched and enjoyed over your lunch break. Lunchbox Shorts 3.0 brought together short films that focus on the changes and lessons kids inevitably learn, and the sacrifices parents make for them. The short films were diverse in tone and story, but each challenged how the audience looks at and values life.

The collection opened with The Sky Was Candy, directed and written by Anh Tú Nguyen. This extra-short film uses playful nursery rhymes and hypnotizing phenakistoscope animation to depict a familiar story about life and loss. This was an engaging, light opener, and the themes of a young child who discovers and then accepts grief resonated throughout the rest of the shorts. 

The second animation, Awake, tells the story of political prisoner Mahmoud Khalil, contrasted with the first. It was a moody, provocative piece about democracy and human rights. The style of the movie was quite profound. The sketch-like animation throughout and the depiction of waves engulfing the screen when Mahmoud reads, “rights are but words written on water,” create an atmosphere of suffocation and tension. The film’s profoundness and intensity made it extremely memorable and thought-provoking. 

Lunchbox Shorts also included two live-action pieces, both equally heart-wrenching. Pale Sun, the longest short, was shot almost exclusively at the eye level of 12-year-old Abel, who grapples with loyalty and social acceptance. The extreme close-ups worked exceptionally well, as the audience is intimate with the violence of Abel’s shame about his father’s sick body, but privy to the distance and avoidance caused by adolescent fear. The restrained point of view created an ambiguity that the audience had to work through, making it the most cinematic of the shorts. 

Equally impactful was The Two Week Wait, a strong expository piece on the emotional and psychological toll of struggling with IVF. The tension and deterioration of the protagonist’s dissociative experiences are perfectly interrupted by the inappropriate jabs of her partner, making it all seem much more real. The nuance the film brings to its commentary on the gendered relationship between fertility and worth makes this film an emotional but heartwarming watch.

My personal favourite of the collection was the finale, A Little Death. The film follows the Grim Reaper and his young apprentice, Little Death, who keeps getting distracted by the beauty of the world around her, testing his patience and understanding of his role. The film was tonally engaging, shifting from light and silly to dark, then to hilarious and unexpected. The silent film perfectly captured the theme of Lunchbox Shorts, as death serves as a lens to appreciate life and question what we truly value. A Little Death is a cute but expressive way to show how children do things their own way, and the ending left off on the same happy beat we started the collection with.

The Lunchbox Shorts were the perfect way to spend one’s lunch break with great films and great food! Be sure to check out this or any other curated collection of shorts the next time the EIFF rolls around!