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Vancouver Island Short Film Festival offers online and theatre viewing

Two-day event takes place at VIU’s Malaspina Theatre on April 21-22
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Victoria-based filmmaker Pauline Gallinat will present ‘Time Together’ at the Vancouver Island Short Film Festival at VIU’s Malaspina Theatre on April 22. (Submitted photo)

Although the Vancouver Island Short Film Festival submissions committee received more than 160 entries this year, only 20 made the cut.

The Nanaimo-based film festival returns for its 18th year this weekend, running April 21-22 at Vancouver Island University’s Malaspina Theatre.

Festival director Zoey Heath said she and submissions co-ordinator Greg Brown selected a wide and diverse array of committee members, hoping they would all bring a different skill set to the job.

“The selection committee really got the diversity angle in terms of mediums and people in front and behind the cameras. It’s a really awesome lineup,” Heath said.

Works by international filmmakers from Australia, Iran, Japan, U.K., the United States, as well as Canadian filmmakers from B.C. and Ontario, will be featured over the two-day event.

Victoria-based graphic designer Pauline Gallinat is one such filmmaker.

Gallinat originally created Time Together as a passion project for the 48 Hour Film Challenge while living in Yukon in 2019. In early 2020, the short became a part of the Yukon Film Society’s Available Light Film Festival.

The filmmaker said her lighthearted two-minute short offers a snapshot into a couple’s dynamic as they settle down to go to bed. In what Gallinat suggests is a familiar exchange in most relationships, one of the characters has a need to share and yearns attention, while the other character appears to simply want to read a book.

“It is a very subtle scene of two people having different needs,” she said. “It is a neat situation where you have many levels of communication between people… It doesn’t give you a clear answer about whether it’s a bad or a good relationship – are these people in love or not?… People have different needs and that’s OK.”

The concept for the film, Gallinat said, was inspired by her own relationship with her partner, and is subtly also a queer story since one of the two characters is non-binary and she thought it was important not to have definite gender roles.

Time Together was only made possible when Emma Seward came to Gallinat’s rescue.

“My only role was to come over and babble and talk,” Seward joked. The filmmaker reiterated the project was a collaborative effort where, without a script, Seward had tried to get her attention by saying whatever came to mind.

Time Together is a part of of the Vancouver Island Short Film Festival’s second program which will show on April 22. It can also be viewed at www.paulinegallinat.com.

This year’s event will also offer online viewing, the festival director said, for audience members who may not yet want to venture into crowded spaces, or for international viewers.

Further information, include program lineup and ticket prices for the festival can be found at www.visff.com.

READ MORE: Vancouver Island Short Film Festival happening online due to COVID-19


mandy.moraes@nanaimobulletin.com

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Mandy Moraes

About the Author: Mandy Moraes

I joined Black Press Media in 2020 as a multimedia reporter for the Parksville Qualicum Beach News, and transferred to the News Bulletin in 2022
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