A lot of things happen when a person speaks up – they enter a world and they leave another behind. The brief for this year’s Hot Docs’ third shorts programme is as follows. ‘The freedom to say what you feel in a world of walls’. This program has its viewers seeing the world and hearing the words of a Quebecois couple, a queer French Tuinisian writer, and a bunch of annoying Americans. Let’s begin.

The voices of a Quebecois couple are the first we hear in this program, courtesy of Auceane Roux’s Washed Away. The husband in that couple narrates how he went back into his own house despite the damages of the 2019 flood. This disaster is worse than the ones they normally get. A few minutes later, it shows the viewers the same house but showing signs of abandonment. A house that its owners can no longer rescue. The crisp visuals and subtle score can be cold in their simplicity. But there’s a haunting quality within its final shots, showing that all these people’s pain, well, wash away.

A queer French-Tunisian writer sees her first novel amongst other books in Pauline Vidal and Myriam Amri’s The Release. The title is self explanatory. The film’s first minute is probably its most provocative one. There, she reads out questions that dumb French white women tell her. Nothing seemingly happens within the next five minutes or so. It’s just a bunch of her friends celebrating her birthday and the release and then her picking outfits so she looks authentic yet cool. It does, however, save itself during the bookstore scenes. Some say an author dies when they release their work, but I’m actually seeing someone come alive.

“i don’t want to be palatable in the way that i’m easy to swallow. If they’re going to eat me alive, i want them to have to chew”. These are fighting words from jaye simpson. they’re an Indigenous Two Spirit trans woman who grew up in the foster system and is now thriving as a Vancouver-era writer and drag queen. There’s a well balanced levity in I’ll Tell You When I’m Ready. They scour the Vancouver streets like a villain. To me they’re more like an antihero, using their time to search for places reminding them of their mother. Most of the short though is them reading their file when they were under the system, which somehow make for the best scenes in the program.

Children are on the forefront in Faye Tsakas’ Christmas, Every Day. A quick language lesson for youse from an ESL immigrant who needs the spell check feature on Google Docs. So I read the synopsis for this saying that this takes place in rural America. I may be wrong about this, but rural implies poor, exurb implies rich, and in describing girls who are rich, use exurb. Anyway, the short starts out innocently. Let these girls do their unboxing videos instead of stocking grocery shelves like I did because the former makes more money. But by the time the short showed one of the girls in a Peloton, it already disgusted me, as per its intention.

I’m ending this piece with a Throwback Thursday or, in the case of TR(ol)L, a double throwback. As someone who was 12 during 1999, the setting of this short, I had no idea this was happening. I knew about TRL and it feels like the short is trying to explain too much about it, but then again I, as a millennial, have to explain seemingly obvious pop culture bits to people born in the 90s. Anyway, the short captures what they claim are actual AOL chats of people trying to rig the TRL voting system to see whether the system was honest. Their method – voting in a New Kids on the Block song to the top of the show’s charts. If you don’t remember whether it worked, watch the short on Hot Docs to find out.