PROGRAMME 1
Sep 6, 9:30pm, AMC 3; Sep 7, noon, AGO
The main attraction here is Denis Villeneuve’s Cannes prizewinner Next Floor, which depicts the most revolting dinner-table behaviour since Monty Python’s Meaning of Life — and the most surreal smorgasbord since The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. (Mmm… rhinoceros.) Despite the best efforts of their wait staff, the gobbling snobs are rudely sent back down to earth, one dusty floor at a time: hardly an understated social critique, perhaps, but really, who needs subtlety? Perhaps Villeneuve can borrow some from Nicholas and Sheila Pye, whose impeccably shot puzzler The Earring — about the ambiguous bond between two young women — walks a fine line between entrancing and inscrutable.

PROGRAMME 2
Sep 7, 9:45pm, AMC 3; Sep 8, 3:15pm, AMC 3.
The standouts in this programme both tend towards the impressionistic: Felix Dufour-Laperrière’s Rosa Rosa uses a versatile collage, animation style, to tell the story of life during wartime for one young couple. Its chiaroscuro images are extremely pretty, but they’re trumped by Philip Barker’s live-action compositions in Night Vision, which uses a striking framing device (a woman at a psych exam is asked to devise a back story for a strange group photo) as the diving-off point for some enchanted water-borne episodes.

PROGRAMME 3
Sep 9, 9:30pm, AMC 3; Sep 10, 3:30pm, AMC 3.
TIFF is no longer grouping shorts by theme, but sex would certainly be the common denominator in this group. Jordan Canning’s Bedroom uses one flawlessly well-acted 17-minute take to capture a universal moment in the lives of most couples: the halting, guilt-induced admission of a long-suppressed kink (which Canning thankfully doesn’t play for laughs). The characters in Passages, meanwhile, are considerably less clenched about their desires, and also far less verbose: Karl Lemieux’s impressionistic account of what it’s like to be the fourth wheel at a threesome unfolds in vivid black-and-white — and entirely without dialogue.

PROGRAMME 4
Sep 10, 7pm, AGO; Sep 11, 5pm, AMC 3.
One could be forgiven for mistaking Machine With Wishbone for a work of CGI: it’s all small, precise, moving parts against pure white space. But Randall Okita’s film is actually a work of remarkable physical effort, with the director putting elaborately designed miniatures (by sculptor Arthur Ganson) through some gently surreal paces. There’s some similarly compelling minimalism on display in animator Susan Turcot’s Crush, Pierce, Escape; Notes on the Boreal, which puts a continent’s environmental upheaval into starkly compelling — and quite literally black and white — terms.

PROGRAMME 5
Sep 11, 8pm, AMC; Sep 12, 2:30pm, AMC 3.
Duraid Munajim’s What I’ve Lost is devastatingly simple, turning an HD camera on Iraqi exiles and asking them to do the titular bit of inventory — that the lists of dead and missing family members start to seem redundant after a while is this effective, empathetic film’s horrifying point. What I’ve Lost might work as an alternate title for Princess Margaret Blvd, which features Gina Sylvester in an impressively unsentimental performance as an older woman struggling with the onset of Alzheimer’s. Director Kazik Radwanski smartly delineates the experience of the disease by balancing naturalistic 35mm camera work against a tense, fragmented editing rhythm: the images have clarity even as they’re slightly disconnected from one another.