Tuesday, June 23, 2009

One of the greatest things about attending SIFT this year was meeting some won­derful film­makers. Paramita Nath is a Toronto native who has just had her first film, a doc­u­mentary short, accepted at the Palm Springs Shortfest in California. Although it might offi­cially be the world premiere, we were lucky enough to see it in our doc­u­mentary work­shop first.

Found packs a lot into its brief 6-minute run­ning time. It tells the life story of Toronto poet Souvankham Thammavongsa through a note­book that she found after her father dis­carded it. Using her own poetry, anim­a­tion, home video and excerpts from her father’s note­book, Thammavongsa her­self nar­rates how she made her way as a pre­ma­ture baby from a Lao refugee camp in Thailand all the way to Toronto. By pre­serving the essen­tial mys­tery of what’s actu­ally in the note­book, and there­fore leaving her father an enigma, Thammavongsa’s story seems like the begin­ning of a longer quest to find out who she is, and this small evoc­ative film makes the viewer curious to dis­cover more of the poetry that accom­panies the beautifully-captured images (cap­tured, incid­ent­ally, by Jennifer Baichwal’s hus­band and reg­ular cine­ma­to­grapher, Nick de Pencier).

Palm Springs Shortfest runs from June 23–29 and Found will be screening on Wednesday June 24 at 7:00pm.

(9/10)

Tagged as: shorts

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