This year’s Future of Film Showcase shows brave, new short format work from filmmakers under 40. This showcase comes from a diverse group who show life from different perspectives. Some of those perspectives include a woman, a man, and even an alien. If that’s not interesting enough for audiences I don’t know what is.

Alicia Eisen has worked as an animator for shows like Rick and Steve the Happiest Gay Couple in All the World. This time around she has her own short project that she calls Deady Freddy, showing the life of a man who dies. After that death she shows us what looks like a bug. I can write here what the bug has to do with the dead boomer. But it’s more fun to the audience to find that out on their own. The premise is very Tumblr creepy pasta but Eisen makes it both fun and makes us rethink our lives.

Wang Weibin’s My Ideal Family is the first short dealing with Asian families. Some audiences might assume that the protagonist’s ideal family is not her own, but it is. The film’s narrator contextualizing old home videos with the lessons her family thought her. The narrator, by the way, is Wang’s grandmother. She also talks about her two siblings, one of which is female. This is a different demographic than the stereotypical Chinese family. It’s a little hippy. That quality makes this my least favorite film if I had to choose one, but his impressionistic imagery amazes.

Carol Nguyen’s No Crying at the Dinner Table is one of those ironic titles because it shows the director making her subjects break that rule. She gets her family one by one at the table, sometimes doing nothing but just sit there. But she eventually talks to them about a person they’ve lost. My filmmaker stepbrother hasn’t done this to me and I have mixed feelings if he ever dares to. Back to Dinner Table, sharp imagery, emotionally resonant, best of the shorts and her best work yet. Can’t wait for something feature length from her. I am writing this at a time when it doesn’t feel crazy to group chat the living members of my family and I will do that right now.

Family is also a topic in Conor Casey and Rebecca Love’s Ripe, about Nick (Casey) and Cheslea (Sarah Swire). They’re trying to decide between making a family or for Chelsea to be in the theatrical production of her dreams. There’s a spin here to give Nick some sympathy. He has testicular cancer, and he can either have a kid now or never, losing that chance when he starts treatment. The camera closes up on both actors who perform well in pleading their case to both each other and to the audience.

Simon Rucinski’s Urban Planning aims for a different kind of appeal. It shows us what happens when, to my understanding, an alien invades a human body. That or this alien can just walk around Hamilton and record footage of the city. We only know about the alien because of someone narrating their thoughts while showing strange looking infrastructure. This hilariously shows the mundane in a different context, making us think about our world with fresh eyes.

Lastly, there’s Scott Fitzpatrick’s Fifth Metacarpal or Fifth Metacarpal Redux. He shows us black and white x-rays of the hand that he, fictionally or not, broke. He also shows the ambiguous morality behind that injury. That ambiguous morality is LGBT+ adjacent, I like his depiction of non-model minorities.

The Future of Film Showcase partners up with the CBC. And CBC Gem is streaming this showcase between August 21 to September 4.