Childhood and teenhood see representation in Hot Docs’ short films this year. I planned this piece to be a review of the fifth shorts program. But I got a screener for one of the shorts in the fourth one so why not. The elevator pitch for the fourth one is “The body is a battleground”. Meanwhile for the fifth one, it’s “Genres and stories shift as generational bonds ignite”. So I’m getting the genre bending one? Exciting, let’s begin.

‘A lot of things stem from one’s childhood’ seems like the message of Eisha Marjara’s short documentary Am I The Skinniest Person You’ve Ever Seen?. She creates this short out of many images. Among them are pictures of what seems like a happy childhood, deceptively happy because of a rivalry she had with her sister who was skinnier than her. Some aspects of the short don’t come off the right way. But then again, there is no right way to criticize this short. Here, Marjara is being vulnerable about her experiences. Also, there’s the same kind of levity that I find in her feature length fictional work that she somehow pulls off better here. Even if yes, it also comes across as cutesy.

The opener for the fifth program is Rachel Gutgarts’ Via Dolorosa, a semi-autobiographical account of the director recovering from drugs. Her path to recovery includes walking down the titular street in Jerusalem where she sees younger versions of herself. Through animation, she depicts the barbed wire, the occasional glimpses of nature, young people in light and shadows. The animation is fine, and there are attempts of inclusion here especially during the end title card, but I feel like it’s too afraid to be honest about the concept of homecoming.

Katy Araiza’s Ice Love is next, where the director mixes reenactments with photographs of the facility she checked into to recover from her titular addictions, ice and love. She does double duty as she narrates her story. And there’s something compelling about her scratchy alto when she’s speaking in Mexican Spanish. It does take a bit for the connections between the images to make sense. But once it does, there’s an affecting story here of friendship and solidarity. It makes sense for her to find other women going through the same things as she does. And viewers can feel that bond even if we only see glimpses of those other women. Despite its flaws, my favourite of the program because of its sensual parts.

The program returns to animation with Hey Little One, where friends of new parents visit Edna, a baby with inconsistent blood pressure. Viewers see the kind of animation here that even I can draw. But it does subtle things with levity and movement. There’s something about the scene with an actual photograph of hospital equipment that made me laugh. It makes me temporarily forget my questions about this short. For instance, where are the parents? This French Canadian short can also benefit with staggering storytelling. There’s also some slack when it comes to the ending but I expect it to affect viewers in a good way.

Yasmina El Kamaly’s The Mother and the Bear is next, and in this short, El Kamaly and her mother turn the camera on each other, asking questions that are more difficult than they seem. The framing here is interesting, as we don’t see the mother’s in full. It’s as if El Kamaly is protecting her mother instead of making the latter feel uncomfortable in the metaphorical hot seat. El Kamaly brings up a thing that she read in her mother’s journals, which reminds me of what Viola Davis’ character says in Eleanor Rigby about children being in therapy for things their parents don’t even remember saying. This is the one that made me almost cry.

The story of Where My Memory Began begins 400 years ago, when some Atlantic slaves braved the ocean to return to Africa, eventually finding a cotton tree and using that to mark their settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Recent events see the death of that tree, and the rest of the short has an elder trying to access the memories she has with the tree. A few things are happening here, like Muslim women praying and the elder narrating in Krio. The short does have the challenge of not finding its story, and because of this, a few people did not not give it good ratings in Letterboxd. Those ratings feel too harsh for something this aesthetically pleasing, even if this is more style than substance.

A series of conversations between director Efrat Berger and her mother’s Filipina caregiver is the basis of the program’s last short, Nothing Special. I am asking the director not to set herself up with a title like this. This short takes place in ugh, another short in the parts of Palestine with European colonists? Really, Hot Docs!? I mean this one at least has a plot, thankfully. And that fourth wall break was fun too. But what is the point of a short that’s basically the coloniser’s version of The Help? It brushes off its subjects’ dreams because it’s the only way colonisers see women of colour. An okay way to end the program because if I go on, I’ll get angrier. Bye!