Happy Birthday Canada!!! One hundred and forty-five years ago you were but a fragmented stretch of land with nothing tying you together. And now, here we stand together, from coast to coast to coast, the “True North, strong and free”. To commemorate your special day, we have amassed this playlist of Canadian shorts. And though we usually cap our playlists at ten shorts, we’ve cranked it up to eleven because, well, on a scale of one to ten that’s what you are, an eleven.
Selected shorts include: The Canadian national anthem played by one jazz musician from each province and territory in Franck Janin’s Around Canada; Daryl Cloran’s P.M.O., a hilarious story of a non-confidence vote gone horribly wrong; The Colombo Plan: Recipe for a Canadian Novel by Kristin Somborac and Nick Fairhead, a tongue in cheek description of Canadian identity by poet John Robert Colombo; Back in ’93 by Mark Montefiore, in which ten year old Torontonian, Tino, reveals he is a closet Habs fan; Nima Ehtemam and Noah Wohl’s Somnium, a stylistic creation myth using animated native Canadian imagery; Living History by Isaac Cravit, in which a father and son re-enact the Upper Canada Rebellion and reestablish the loyalty between them; an Anglophone struggles to make himself understood in francophone Montreal in Frenching by J.C. Little and Jen MacIntyre; The Canadian Shield by Simon Ennis, in which a mountie searches for some existential nourishment… and his missing horse; Winnipeg curling star Jennifer Jones’ daydreams become disco reality in Athletes In Motion: Hardcore Bonspiel by John Kerr; Brian Stockton pays tribute to Saskatchewan architect, Joseph Pettick in The Man Who Built My Childhood and to wrap it up, 12 Ways to Say ‘I’m Sorry’ by Alex Epstein, a series of comic vignettes demonstrating the subtleties of the Canadian expression “I’m Sorry”.