Following are some highlights from the current incarnation of the International Festival of Cinema + Technology (IFCT), which packs up and heads for Australia after concluding its Toronto run this week. Another in a recent spate of film festivals specializing in non-features, the IFCT is noteworthy because it explicitly honours the digital video revolution that brought on a short-film boom in the first place. (The goal of the event, quoth the literature, is to "discover the undiscovered," making it prime iViews fodder.) The DIY aspect of the festival's line-up alas has its drawbacks, at least from my brief and random sampling of the eighty (!) titles scheduled--I wish I could report that Coppola's Hearts of Darkness prophecies have been fulfilled, but the strongest selections covered herein (Viendo Llover, Kann ich abhaben?, The Love Doctor) possibly originated with television executives.-Bill Chambers

A half-star for earnestness, but I had hoped that after graduating from film school I would never bump into student output this amateurish again. Crimson and Clover (inconsistently written as Crimson & Clover within the closing credits) begins with a confused voiceover in which a black youth bemoans the difficulty reformed thugs have in landing jobs before talking about how easy it was for him, a reformed thug, to find work at a florist's. While that's nowhere near the nadir of the film's ineptitude, taking stock of a tech-college production's sins is a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel for my tastes; suffice it to say that Crimson and Clover's acceptance into any festival without the name "Edward D. Wood Jr." embedded in its appellation seems inconceivable. Anybody who ever attempted to make an M.O.S. ("Mit Out Sound" or "without sound") short featuring lengthy character exchanges should get a hearty chuckle out of the scenes in which our hero, Syd (Michael Anthony), nonverbally assists the patrons of his flower shop.-BC

Weak and weary, indeed: Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven is ultimately hurt by an impossible to staunch disappointment that new filmmakers would dedicate their energies and resources to something so overfamiliar. Bizarrely evocative of the New Wave genre in '80s music videos (it could pass for a rejected Pet Shop Boys clip, maybe), this umpteenth retelling of the Poe verse, shot in muddy black-and-white, takes place in a sparsely-dressed room and features a man in a white shirt and loosened tie (Louis Morabito; Michael G. Sayers handles narration duties) interacting with an unabashedly mechanical bird. Nods to German Expressionism don't pass by unappreciated--audio distortion effects, on the other hand, do. Still, it's not the contemptible bid for insta-credibility that was Sandy Collora's unauthorized Batman: Dead End.-BC

A viewing ordeal to say the least, the excruciatingly busy Highly Strung concerns two couples caught in a criss-cross of infidelity the day of a mixed doubles tennis tournament. The film has all the elements of a flagship Britcom, indulging shrill middle-aged women who never met a man they couldn't henpeck, mistaking coarse language for wit ("Oh, the unmistakable stink of...bullshit"), and looking like it was shot on congealed vomit.-BC

Nightclub chanteuse Zoétte (Rosario Dawson clone Chantal de Freitas) is mugged and sexually assaulted on her way to the drycleaners, but because she's missing her I.D. when she reports the incident (this is some Orwellian future in which everybody is a suspect first), authorities toss her into a psych ward--alongside her attacker, to boot. Whereupon the rest of the world, including her awful husband (Dirc Simpson), subjects her to reproachful glares. Predating Mathieu Kassovitz's Gothika by three years, Looking into the Rain (Viendo Llover) seems to have had an uncredited impact on that film, particularly in its gritty tinted cinematography and choice of a black female protag--and maybe because it was directed by a woman, the unceremoniousness of Zoétte's incarceration is more visceral than that of Gothika's heroine. I just wish I had a better idea of what I'm supposed to take away from Looking into the Rain: a fear of neurotic bureaucracies (valid), or anger about the marginalization and subsequent social tainting of rape victims (also valid, but somehow less timely).-BC

Visually elevated by the breathtaking Emma Catherwood (fresh from making the rare strong impression on the BBC's unremarkable "Born and Bred"), The Love Doctor is well-cast, well-shot, well-paced, and flimsier than a wet noodle. When exterminators Vivek (likable Nitin Chandra Ganatra) and Vinnie (Enzo Cilenti) are called to the home of a mad scientist (Heathcote Williams), Vivek pilfers a tin of "love balm" and discovers that by rubbing it on his ears, he can hear people's thoughts. A little telepathy is the answer to his prayers, as the right words have continually eluded him in his quest to patch things up with ex-girlfriend "T" (Catherwood). Too sentimental to bother with the sinister/vicarious possibilities of Vivek's newfound superpowers (he can hear men's thoughts, too), The Love Doctor is a post-modern Cyrano de Bergerac in which chemicals play the ventriloquist, though that implies a much more prescient film than the one we're stuck with. The most intriguing plot strand belongs to the initially loutish Vinnie, who is redeemed and perhaps even psychologically damaged by his own contact with the balm. But it's a digression that, like the movie to which it belongs, ultimately fizzles out.-BC

It's not writer-director Shawn Harris' fault that Takashi Miike's Audition rendered all subsequent discourse on the subject of cattle calls superfluous. In an energetic but desktop editing-happy opening sequence, actresses waiting to read for some lousy production pore over their lines and their anxieties; a broad tone is thus set, always a resourceful gird for amateur filmmakers against charges of bad acting. When a blonde (Cristi Ellen Harris) and a brunette (Polly Blanchard) have their turn, they are subjected to a harangue from the tetchy casting director, who, in an innovative yet politically sheepish move, is played by a woman (Holly Mandel). In a tacked-on epilogue, Star Quality becomes a King of Comedy-like fantasy of underdog revenge (I hesitate to say media indictment), highlighting the fact that although the piece is zippy and not without laughs, it's unfortunately about as constructive as a daydream.-BC

Transparently inspired by Pleasantville, True Blue Beauty pre-packages itself as a fifties-nostalgia piece for no discernible reason except maybe to excuse the core misogyny of its premise, which finds a young woman (Melinda Lind) throwing herself at a man (Jeff Hofmann) because she happens to have sat next to him at a bus stop. Or is it because he's holding a flower (which is blue, though everything else is in black-and-white), making him look romantically viable? Either way, she's hitting on a catatonic stranger later billed as "The Dead Man"--I didn't get the deceased part at all, maybe because corpses aren't in the habit of blinking and swallowing at regular intervals. Cycling through a minimal amount of coverage in no time flat, True Blue Beauty was not especially well thought-out on any level.-BC

The live-action stop-motion exercise What's in it for Me? (Kann ich was abhaben?) brings back fond memories of those weird interstitial shorts that used to flavour the typical episode of "Sesame Street"--for many children of my generation their first exposure to the avant-garde. A levitating man nonetheless accompanied by the pitter-patter of footsteps is evidently fantasizing a better time than the one he's having in an Altered States-ish depravation tank. As if to convey the frustratingly circuitous logic of dreams, his inner journey is one heavy in ring imagery, from the lasso he fashions to catch a speeding convertible to a shark that stalks its prey in a predictable 360-degree motion. It's all very droll, if demanding; an ending credits sequence rewards our patience with behind-the-scenes footage that sheds light on the trick photography--and staves off inevitable accusations of pretentiousness in the bargain.-BC

It's no wonder that Jeremiah Kipp's accomplished The Christmas Party arrives with the ringing endorsement of Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, Habit): it taps into the same vein that feeds Fessenden's vision of upstate New York as a cross-cultural powder keg. But Kipp's camera is more controlled than Fessenden's, and the absence of anything documentary-like in The Christmas Party's aesthetic (save its DV origins) contributes a false sense of security that is utterly appropriate given the picture's insidious premise. Young Gabriel (Austin Labbe) is staying with his grandparents Bill (Pete Barker, a late-blooming powerhouse) and Paula (Marilyn Bernard) during what's inferred as his mother's stay in rehab. Sensing her grandson's feelings of isolation, Paula hustles Gabe off to the titular shindig, which turns into an intervention of sorts as a minister (Tom Reid) and his wife (Stephanie Foster) attempt to "save" the nondenominational child. As someone who has only set foot in a church four times in his entire life (two weddings, two funerals), I found The Christmas Party especially resonant: religion held a certain allure when I was Gabe's age--and also something of a depressed misfit--not for theological reasons, but because of its air of fraternity. Despite the paranoid staging of the early scenes inside the minister's home (which appear to have been influenced by the support-group sessions from Todd Haynes' Safe), Gabe's guileless reaction to being saved makes it difficult to peg The Christmas Party as a Christian-basher, while Kipp goes so far as to turn his uncompromising gaze on agnostics for the shattering denouement. A cannily judged piece.-Bill Chambers

Merging the sensibilities of early Coen Brothers with Jim Jarmusch, Vince Di Meglio's brilliant El Elegante functions as something of a companion piece to his Fits & Starts (itself fantastic) in its highly stylized discussion of the difficulties of communication and the grace of small gestures. An early shot of a mirror spinning on a horizontal access finds a parallel in the heroine (Darla Gordon) falling in a hotel room corridor filled with newspapers. The picture is all about composition and symbol, located as it is in Barton Fink's festering psyche and peppered with the sort of deadpan performances and sprung dialogue of Dead Man or Down by Law. A cult classic in the making; Di Meglio, a sought-after digital effects technician by day, demonstrates a knowledge of filmmaking wise and poetic. Considering how perfect his short subjects are, I don't know exactly what he'd do with a feature-length production--but I'm excited to find out.-Walter Chaw

Adam Elliot's Oscar-winning animated short is an Aardman-like claymation detailing the bittersweet life of "retarded migrant" Harvie Krumpet as he finds love, loses love, and compiles a book of "fakts" that makes Forrest Gump's country-fried homilies the embossed condescension that they are. Only as sad and ebullient as the vagaries of life can be, Harvie Krumpet is an economical statement on the elusive madness of love and the temporary rewards of loving that make all the suffering double-edged.-WC

Nathaniel Atcheson weighs in on the stereotypes ruling misconceptions of homosexual behaviour in the gentle, amusing Investigaytion. Concerned parents hire a private investigator to unveil the seedy underbelly of their gay son's lifestyle, only to discover that he's every bit as boring as they are. Well-intentioned and shot with a nice, easy eye; if what appears to be a parting shot at breeders lands a little heavy, it at least has the wisdom to be relatively innocuous enough to forgive. The picture, technically proficient, is promising for its sense of humour about itself, its topicality, and its sense of purpose.-WC