Christian Meer as Bortnik in Rich Williamson and Shasha Nakhai’s sharp satire Bots.Kenya-Jade Pinto/Supplied
As much as its well-meaning organizers prefer to think of themselves as working for “the people’s festival,” there are inescapable tiers when it comes to programming the Toronto International Film Festival. Galas and Special Presentations at the top, documentaries somewhere in the middle, shorts near or at the very bottom.
The organizing principle is of course nonsense, given how much startling talent is reliably selected by TIFF’s Short Cuts team every year. And we’re not just talking about the famous faces who are making good on their directorial ambitions and are regularly welcomed into the shorts slate with open arms. (This year, it’s Idris Elba’s turn to lend the program some celebrity shine.)
But there is also a curious trend cropping up in TIFF’s 2025 shorts slate that suggests the medium’s practitioners are stretching their own boundaries and limitations. Basically: Why make a short film and attract little attention when you can also make a television pilot that just might help you land a real deal?
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Two of this year’s Canadian shorts are playing just that kind of game, with Rich Williamson and Shasha Nakhai’s sharp satire Bots and Kelly Fyffe-Marshall and Preeti Torul’s multigenerational drama Demons both constructed as standalone short films that double as proof-of-concept springboards for potential TV series.
“It’s incredibly hard to get anything made in Canada – television in Canada has gotten smaller and smaller. So for us, any proof of concept lives as a short film, this is how we can get attention,” says screenwriter Torul, who has spent the past few years developing her mother-daughter drama Demons as a 10-episode scripted series, with support from such institutions as Ontario Creates and TIFF’s own series accelerator program.
Kelly Fyffe-Marshall and Preeti Torul’s Demons is being developed as a 10-episode scripted series.Archipelago Productions/Supplied
“We basically made the eight-minute film as the last scene of our pilot,” she adds. “So there’s a way to bring an audience into the world and leave them wanting more, hopefully.”
A similar impetus was behind the development of Bots, a 14-minute comedy about sad sacks working in a disinformation-peddling office complex, which was developed by director/co-writer Williamson and producer Nakhai, the creative team behind the award-winning 2021 film Scarborough.
“We wanted to have lots of characters, so that if you see it you’ll get the idea for a series in there – you’ll understand just a little hint of the conflicts that might arise in a space like this, the dynamics,” says Williamson.
Although Williamson and Nakhai, partners in both life and the arts, also had another, more practical economic force driving them.
“We’d won prizes for Scarborough from festivals that included equipment rentals, and to be honest it was expiring. We were hoping to put it toward our next feature film, but it was taking so long for the financing to come together,” recalls Nakhai. “So we thought, well, let’s make a short. Wait, no, let’s make a proof-of-concept for a series. Wait, it can be both.”
Yet each filmmaking team was careful to not alienate their respective audiences, with the shorts needing to function as both standalone stories and tantalizing glimpses of potentially longer-form storytelling.
“With most shorts, there’s an ending that makes you feel satisfied. But this is also a teaser, so you have to make people want more but also make audiences fall in love with these characters in a short period of time,” says Demons director Fyffe-Marshall, who has experience with both short-form entertainment (her 2020 TIFF selection Black Bodies, the Crave sitcom Bria Mack Gets a Life) and feature-length film (the 2022 drama When Morning Comes).
“I’ve been practising for this moment, and with Demons, Preeti had so much more ready to go that I was able to understand where the story was going, but also come up with a great short.”
Both filmmaking teams acknowledge that it has only become more difficult to get attention for short films – not just at TIFF, but elsewhere in the screen sector dominated by streamers – but this two-for-one approach might also help them stand out in the ongoing war for eyeballs.
“In Canada, in order for the broadcasters and studios to take a chance on you, they need to see what you can do,” Fyffe-Marshall says. “It’s easy to come up with a great script, a great package, and say this is what I’m delivering. But they can say, well, what will it look like? Can you do it? This is the way to show them.”
The relatively low time commitment and production budgets also allow filmmakers to experiment in genre and tone with minimal risk.
“Bots is totally different from Scarborough, and it’s part of our rebellion against that, because a lot of the work we got offered immediately afterward were basically, well, making Scarborough,” says Nakhai.
“The filmmakers we admire are people who are genre-agnostic and follow their curiosity wherever it takes them,” adds Williamson.
Even, perhaps, a television screen.
Bots premieres as part of TIFF’s Shorts Cuts Programme 2 (Sept. 6, Sept. 10); Demons premieres as part of Short Cuts Programme 3 (Sept. 7, Sept. 11). More information at tiff.net.