Canada’s Top Ten Shorts 2011 - Program I

ORA • Body heat and dance make for an extraordinary visual experience in this collaboration between director Baylaucq and choreographer José Navas, the first film shot with infrared thermal-imaging cameras. Philippe Baylaucq/15 mins.

Hope • Visual effects artist Pires’s follow-up to his award-winning short Danse Macabre (Canada’s Top Ten 2009) offers a visceral, stunningly visual exploration of war through the eyes of a dying general. Pedro Pires/11 mins.

We Ate the Children Last • Adapted from a cautionary sci-fi story by Life of Pi author Yann Martell, the unsettling tale of a radical medical breakthrough — pig-to-human organ transplants — and its unexpected social consequences. Andrew Cividino/13 mins.

Choke • Selected for Sundance, this pensive, poetic, and gorgeously crafted stop-motion animated film concerns a young man who leaves his First Nations reserve for a city full of lost souls. Michelle Latimer/6 mins.

Doubles with Slight Pepper • Family wounds reopen when a father returns from Canada to Trinidad one Christmas to visit the son, a street-food vendor, he left behind. Best Canadian Short, TIFF 2011. (Ian Harnarine/16 mins.)