Fantasia 2017, Day 3, Part 1: Cinematic Anthologies (SpectrumFest: Films from the Autism Spectrum and The International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase 2017)
Saturday, July 15, looked like an unusual day for me at Fantasia: I’d mostly be seeing short films. It’d begin a bit after noon, with a set of shorts called SpectrumFest: Films from the Autism Spectrum, a collection of pieces from young filmmakers on the autism spectrum. Then would come this year’s edition of the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, featuring eight science-fictional short films from around the world. Both showings looked fascinating, if in different ways. SpectrumFest was new to me, but I’d seen the SF showcases in previous years, and been impressed both by the individual films and by the way they worked together — if short films are loosely equivalent to prose short stories, the SF short film showcases make excellent anthologies.
First came SpectrumFest. Montreal’s Spectrum Productions is a non-profit organization who works with youth and young adults on the autism spectrum, giving them resources and equipment to express themselves creatively through film and animation. Among other programs, Spectrum runs summer camps and a weekly after-school program, as well as Saturday morning cartoon-making workshops. This year, Fantasia hosted an exhibition of some of the films created by the young filmmakers working with Spectrum in a showcase that was free to the public. Almost two dozen of the student filmmakers’ productions were screened, collectively a stunning and unpredictable burst of creativity.
