Hot Docs’ official blurb for its Learning To Fly shorts have them showing “…the meaning and power of community”…. And yes, there’s a lot of that here, but there are other connective tissues among these short documentaries. Before I get to some of those connections, yes, I have some doubts on these short documentaries’ approaches. But the tens of people who know me by now know that all I need are some good aesthetics.

And by God, Irving Serrano and Víctor Rejon’s short Voices from the Abyss has arresting black and white cinematography. Sure, maybe that and the meditative poetry made me do a double take, thinking those elements were gilding. But as this documentary progresses, it lets its viewers into the minds of its subjects – professional divers from Mexico. The narration helps us get deeper into these divers’ mindsets, necessary components for them to perform for others.

Monica Vanesa Tedja’s My Therapist Said, I am Full of Sadness is next, a film of ‘performances’. The kind of performances where a young queer Indonesian pretends not to feel pain while reuniting with her Christian parents. And those parents pretending that no harmful words nor deeds crossed between them and their loving child. Archive videos and contemporaneous footage show a veneer of normalcy in Tedja’s observational short, my favourite of the program.

In the middle of the pack is Alice, from documentary filmmaker Gabriel Novis, about the titular Brazilian trans woman who goes surfing. Kaleidoscopic in some parts, there are moments of emotional ups and downs as the camera catches her being forlorn, for valid reasons. Narration and archive news explain that Brazil, despite its pro-2LGBT+ reputation, is the number one killer of trans women in the world. There’s also a scene where a motorcycle driver misgenders her, but despite that, she and her friends live their best lives.