CHRISTIE PITS FILM FESTIVAL
Sunday, August 6, 2023

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

With the short films I Think I Like It Here & Bee Problem

If the past feels like a distant world, then memory is how we travel there. But what if our most painful memories could be erased? What would we gain, and what would we lose? This is the central question of master stylist Michel Gondry and iconoclastic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. After a bad breakup, a depressed man (Canadian funnyman Jim Carrey - also seen at TOPS in The Truman Show earlier in August - in a standout dramatic role) learns that his ex (the indelible Kate Winslet) has had all memory of the relationship removed in a new experimental procedure. He decides to do the same, but as he relives the past he begins to regret the decision and the semi-lucid dream world begins to collapse around him in a visual spectacle of Gondry’s trademark effects wizardry. Meanwhile, in the real world, the doctors performing the procedure (an all-star supporting cast of Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood) live through their own memory melodramas.

These existential meditations on memory, love, and loss resonate with the playful stop-motion worlds of local creator Charlie Tyrell (My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes, Broken Orchestra), whose latest short film I Think I Like It Here creatively dramatizes how a shared home remains imbued with meaning and memories even after the people we loved are gone. Likewise, visionary Toronto filmmaker Roney blends the mundane with the surreal in Bee Problem, in which a middle-aged woman faces the everyday challenges of divorce proceedings and life in a world periodically and suddenly swarmed by millions of bees. Both shorts were originally created with funding from TOPS in commemoration of Christie Pits Film Festival’s 10th anniversary in 2020; this year they finally make their CPFF débuts.