Wacky Horror Picture Show: Twelve Vacancies Film Festival
Pushing the Boundaries of Horror and Film
There’s free popcorn on a table to the right, and interviews for Letterbox are being held in the hallway. Giggling students crouch over the microphone and compare notes on recent favorite films while others hunch over a table to admire stickers for the second-ever Twelve Vacancies Film Festival. It’s the evening of November 22nd, and the mood before the showing at Peel Street Cinema is warm and festive. Just the type of environment one of the festival’s coordinators, Amelia McCluskey, was hoping for.
“I feel like there is a community growing around Twelve Vacancies,” Amelia, an English Cultural Studies student at McGill, mentioned in a personal interview. “After the first [film festival], I didn’t feel any kind of pressure to force it to be something. It was cool to sit back and be like, ‘oh, we did this,’ but also it exists on its own in an ongoing way.”
The Twelve Vacancies Film Festival originally started from a small group of friends who wished to contribute to McGill University’s budding film community. Wanting to create a festival that was genre or tone-oriented, they decided to focus on experimental and horror genres, believing there is more room to be playful with them. The evaluation process for submitted films is overall a relaxed and holistic one. TVFF’s five coordinators personally watch and discuss the films together, and instead of having a strict yes or no voting process, they debate amongst themselves about the pros and cons of each short film. This gives more room for the ideas in the films to be discussed.
With over 50 submissions for this festival season, double that of the previous submission round, twelve short films were chosen to be shown at the Fall 2024 Peel Street Cinema screening. The festival’s coordinators prioritized local Quebec filmmakers with over half of the selected shorts being filmed in or around Montreal. The tone of the short films selected ended up being “wacky and quirky” as McCluskey puts it, with the audience often erupting in laughter at films such as Unidonkey and Rabbit Move to Candyland (Imge Su Basmaci), Ant Detective (Quinn Funk), and 24/7 Convenience (Jude Gross). The night’s Fan Favourite Award winner, however, went to Esandi Amarakoon’s Play Along, a surreal stop-motion short film focusing on a child’s feelings of unease around a parent at home.
“I find that my films are often a way for me to process my own emotions, and this project was no exception,” Amarakoon explained in a personal interview. Play Along, created using a mix of animation and stop-motion needle felting, took over eight months to finish. Each frame would take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour to produce. The short film’s ending showed how the power of imagination can be used as a tool to process and overcome difficult emotions. “I hope Play Along resonates with others and serves as a reminder of the strength and resilience that young people can have, even in difficult circumstances,” Amarakoon concluded.
In another short film, Lighthead by Kit Baronas, a closeted teen hides his sexuality from an uber-masculine friend. There’s also a lot of whippets involved. “Lighthead is a collage of everything bad I was experiencing in my life at the time,” Baronas commented, “however, I took all of those drab and lonely moments, and turned it into something beautiful and cathartic.” Due to the improvised and spontaneous nature of the filming, Baronas thinks of the film as a collective story between him and the film’s actors (Cale Ambrozic and Anthony Dionne). He’s hoping to expand out of short films and is currently working on his first ever feature-length film.
At the end of the screening, audience members lingered to chat, debating their favorites and finding it hard to land on just one, while the filmmakers swapped socials and compared notes on stylistic techniques. McCluskey hopes that some of these connections will lead to collaborations in the future. While the future of TVFF has not yet been determined, the whole team is eager to keep the energy around the festival high. They also wish to expand their outreach through other side projects such as a supplementary journal featuring film articles and essays and also having multiple screenings of selected films. For now, though, TVFF’s next submission call will be in early January, and the third Twelve Vacancies film festival will run sometime in March!
To learn more about Twelve Vacancies Film Festival, go to their instagram (@twelvevacancies) or contact them at twelvevacanciesfilmfest@gmail.com.
FULL INTERVIEW WITH KIT BARONAS
What is your full name (how you would like it to be printed)? Are you in school? Major? Anything you would like to share about your background (personal blurb).
My name is Kit Baronas, although my legal name is Christopher. I started going by Kit when I began university because it was the nickname my parents used for me when I was a child, and I wanted to feel closer to them. I attended the University of British Columbia’s Film Production Program and recently graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Born and raised in Vancouver, my entire journey in film so far has been about capturing what I believe Vancouver looks like to me.
As a kid, I would go to see films with my parents, and sometimes they would point out, “Oh look, this was filmed in Vancouver!” I would think to myself, That’s not how Vancouver looks to me. I want to document the lives and people you don’t often see: its connections to religion, its underground arts scene, and all of its gloomy angles.
What inspired you to make “Lighthead”? What kept inspiring you to see it to completion? (your motivation in a more general sense)
Lighthead was a film I created as part of my degree. However, while in school, I didn’t want to limit my films to simply being “a part of my degree.” I wanted to throw myself into this film and really find out who I was as a filmmaker.
I left a part of myself on set when I completed this film. It began as a culmination of a gloomy Vancouver summer where I worked a menial job almost every day from sunup to sun down. I was tired all the time. did nothing creative. I stayed up late. I lived my actual life in the couple of hours from when I got home from work to when I went to bed. In those hours I would sit quietly in an empty park by my house. I began to notice that people were leaving canisters of nitrous oxide around the park, so I started collecting them. Through this I started to remember stories of secondary school and how I had nights similar to those. Strange places in the dead of night. Always tired. My outlook on life from behind birthday balloons. That’s where this film came from.
Lighthead kicked off the development of my writing process as well. As I mentioned before this film came together through parts of my life that inexplicably began to converge together. As a filmmaker I’ve found that this is the only way I can tell a story. I experience things, whether they be from the present or I remember them from the past, and they all force their way into a scenario which I’m compelled to write.
However, this film changed so much from script to production. We ended up improvising a lot on set which was something I wanted to just test but ended up embracing due to the joy it gave me. I was close with the actors I cast for the film and I felt that with their trust we could riff and come up with better moments than what I could ever write. We wouldn’t even rehearse together that often. Our rehearsal process was going out at night to party. The climactic scene of the film, where my character Mark and Cale Ambrozic’s character Joe dance in the rain under the beautiful rays of field lights, was shot completely in the moment. I don’t think I could have achieved this with a traditional process of rehearsing and production. Funny enough there’s a moment in that scene where I cut my head on the camera’s matte box. It was great !
This sense of improvisation and working relationship with myself and the actors drove myself and the crew to think of this film as more of a collective story. A series of moments which don’t necessarily need to make sense together but can just exist. We ended up building the film in post-production from what we got. I credit my editor, and one of my best friends, Kirc Cohen with being that voice in the editing suite that I needed to build this film. I like making movies with my friends. I still do.
How long did it take you to complete this film, from conception to completion?
From concept to completion it took roughly under a year. However, I just went through a re-cut of the film for the edition that played at Twelve Vacancies. It’s still crazy to me how much life this film has gotten. From that initial process of creation I could have never imagined that this film would still be playing festivals more than two years after we completed it. I’m so grateful that it has.
What drew you to the particular actors you chose for this film? Can you speak about their impact on the filmmaking process and the finished product?
As mentioned before, my working relationship with the cast was anything but traditional. I did this by design in some parts because I love directing actors but I was still relatively green. So it was a combination of things I did intentionally and parts that were out of my control which morphed into this Frankenstein’s Monster of a “rehearsal process.”
My first order of business was to build trust between all of us. I thought to myself, Okay who am I? You know, I’m this random kid who hasn’t done anything before and I’ve found these two phenomenal actors off of a Facebook post and convinced them to stay up all night in a dingy school building pretending to inhale nitrous oxide. It was a craaaaazy ask of them. Even more surprising, Cale and Anthony Dionne (who played Connie) were game for what I wanted to do though. It was something I didn’t expect.
To build this trust and to curb my inexperience as a director I really tried to go through their lives as people. I wanted to situate these characters somewhere within their lives so that these characters had some grounds in their lives. Which would make it easier to direct them. For example, Anthony had never done whippets before so I tried to liken the experience as if riding a roller coaster. The whole casting process was like a transcendental experience when I did this. I actually tried to use the same methodology that Scientologists use for their interview process in effect to try and create a trance-like state where I could really find out who these guys were.
It’s interesting to note as well that Cale was meant to play my character in the film, and I was not meant to act in this film. We had another actor booked in to play the lead but they, unfortunately, pulled out two weeks from production so we had to twist around all the roles.
Once this happened we all went out a couple of nights as opposed to rehearsing. It was like trust building exercises. Instead of line readings we got late night subway and listened to a Bon Jovi cover band playing at The Roxy.
Why the name “Lighthead”?
The film ends on a moment of Joe lying down in a hallway, presumably passed out. In my head Joe would probably be thinking something like “Oh I don’t feel very good, I feel really Lightheaded” but he would pass out before finishing the word “lightheaded.” I watched this movie called “Funny Ha Ha” which ends on an unfinished thought. I tried to do something similar.
What were your favorite parts about the filmmaking process? Also, any anecdotes you would like to share?
To list my favourites would be like writing a biography of the entire process. I will distill it all into one moment.
I can’t remember what day this happened but as the clock approached around three or something in the morning, I realized we had finished all of our scenes for the day an hour early. To be entirely candid no one else knew this because our shooting schedule was entirely improvised each day. I talked with my 1st AD and convinced him that we still had more to film because we still had an hour on the schedule. So myself and my Cinematographer Pietro Russolo, took a flat mover’s dolly and sat him down on it with the camera rig. He then started filming while I pushed him on this cart as fast as I could through the hallways of this giant school building where we ultimately became lost. Without walkie-talkies we retraced our steps until we found everyone and wrapped for the day. As it turns out our professor had come to visit the set to see how everything was going. He left when he couldn’t find us. This is a shot that ended up in the final scene of the film.
What would you like people to take away from this short film?
Lighthead is a collage of everything bad I was experiencing in my life at the time. However, I took all of those drab and lonely moments, and turned it into something beautiful and cathartic. I know people just have the film to go off of but I hope that others feel catharsis as powerfully as I do every time I see this film.
Anything else you would like people to know about your work or “Lighthead” in general?
I work almost exclusively with my best friends. Without Kirc Cohen or Pietro Russolo I could not have made this film. I’ve done three shorts with them and now we’re embarking on our first feature length project together. People always say don’t work with those you love. Well, I love my friends, and I want to work with them for the rest of my life.
Some recent movies, TV shows, anything, you have watched recently and would recommend to others?
I was recently in Montreal for the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, where I got to screen my latest film, and had the pleasure of seeing une Langue Universelle by Matthew Rankin. I feel like I earned a Masters Degree in film while watching it. I also greatly embarrassed myself by asking a shaky question at the Q&A afterwards.
FULL INTERVIEW WITH ESANDI AMARAKOON
What is your full name (how you would like it to be printed)? Are you in school? Major? Anything you would like to share about your background (personal blurb).
My name is Esandi Amarakoon, and I’m a recent graduate of Concordia University’s Film Animation program (BFA - Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema). Originally from Colombo, Sri Lanka, I grew up in Ottawa, where my creative journey began. My artistic practice started with portrait painting, eventually leading me to explore digital art and animation. Today, I primarily work as a stop motion and under-camera animator. Beyond animation, I’m deeply interested in pursuing art education as a way to share my love for creativity and storytelling.
What inspired you to make “Play Along”? What kept inspiring you to see it to completion? (your motivation in a more general sense)
Play Along was my undergraduate capstone project, spanning two semesters of work. It was a chance to bring together everything I had learned during my time in the program. Initially, I was motivated by the structure of the course itself (and maybe a little by the desire for academic validation!), but I quickly found deeper inspiration.
My intent with this film was to create something that spoke to the dynamics I faced as a child, recognizing that my experience is not standalone but shared by many. I find that my films are often a way for me to process my own emotions, and this project was no exception. It was always deeply personal, which made it a rewarding but also challenging journey. At times, I even had to take breaks from engaging with the material for the sake of self-preservation.
Having previously explored themes of self-destruction and dissociation in my filmmaking, I viewed this project as the next logical step in my thematic career.
How long did it take you to complete this film, from conception to completion?
From its initial conception to the final cut, Play Along took about eight months to complete. The first four to five months were dedicated to pre-production. During this time, I focused on motion and technique tests to determine if the medium was feasible, constructed the puppet, set, and props, and worked on drafting the script for narration.
The production phase (actually animating) lasted about two months and involved animating both under-camera and puppet stop motion sequences. The final month was spent in post-production, where I created digital in-between frames for the felted sections and painted out the rigs in the stop motion shots.
For specifics: TOTAL HOURS: 750 hours
** I spent a lot of time re-making props/sets*
Working with needle felting seems to be a long and involved process. Your outcome was beautiful, though I’m wondering why you choose to work with this medium specifically.
The visual treatment for the film was central to its storytelling, and needle felting helped me distinguish the dreamlike memories of the girl, while stop motion grounds the film in the harshness of her real world. I wanted the memory sequences to feel fragmented and thought it would be interesting to take a physical element or texture from the film's "real" world and showcase it in this surreal, abstract way.
I also hoped that the soft look of felt would serve as a contrast to the film's darker, harsher imagery, subverting traditional symbols of comfort. For example, the dog—usually seen as man’s best friend—is portrayed as aggressive and destructive, tearing apart a teddy bear, a symbol of childhood. These differences aim to emphasize the girl’s fractured reality and her loss of innocence.
But I will admit, the process was very time-intensive—taking 20 minutes to an hour per frame.
Why the name “Play Along”?
Honestly, the name was one of the last things I decided on—the film remained untitled for most of its creation. I ultimately chose Play Along because it reflected the survival mechanisms of the child in the story. To cope with the abuse, they reframe the parent as something else entirely—an angry dog. This imaginative lens becomes a way for them to make sense of their world and endure their circumstances.
I feel that the title in a way also ties into the script, which references listening carefully and playing pretend. The phrase Play Along felt both fitting and child-appropriate, capturing the act of playing into this constructed reality to survive, while also reflecting the innocence and resilience of a child’s perspective.
The film focuses on a feeling of escapism that can come from using one’s imagination. Can you speak about your relationship with imagination and how that has informed your work? I am thinking especially about how imagination can be used as a way to cope with real-world events.
My relationship with imagination has become somewhat transactional over time. As an artist, I'm constantly expected to invent new worlds, characters, and stories, especially given the pressures of producing films each semester. At times, this has led to creative fatigue, where ideas just stop coming or feel forced.
That said, imagination is still at the core of my work, but it often feels like I need to tap into it on demand. It's a balancing act—while I sometimes wish I could let ideas flow more naturally, there’s also a drive to push through and make something out of nothing. In Play Along, for example, imagination plays a key role in the child’s survival. They reframe their reality through imaginative thinking, turning an abusive figure into something they hope to tame. But the process of bringing that imaginative narrative to life also required me to think creatively under pressure, finding new ways to convey complex emotions visually and through animation.
Ultimately, while imagination sometimes feels like a resource that needs to be used up, it remains a vital tool that allows me to process difficult emotions and translate them into art, even when it feels difficult to access.
What were your favorite parts about the filmmaking process? Also, any anecdotes you would like to share?
While animating frame by frame is an obvious favorite, there are aspects of pre-production that I also deeply enjoy, regardless of the technique. One of these is using myself as a reference—recording my own motions to help map out how my character should move. Scrubbing through the video to break down key poses and timing, especially for lip-sync, is something I always find satisfying.
Another aspect I love is puppet creation. While it can be stressful if the puppet doesn’t turn out as planned, the process is also meditative. Sewing the clothes, felting the body, and sculpting replacement mouths (clay) for lip-sync are repetitive tasks that allow me to zone out and focus. Once the puppet is done, it’s a tangible reminder that the film is coming to life— it's not just an idea anymore, but something real.
Sound design is another passion of mine, and I almost always take on that responsibility for my films, Play Along included. I enjoy the creative problem-solving involved in pre-mixing and the act of sound collection—it’s a grounding part of the process. Experimenting with foley sounds and fine-tuning the mix to bring out emotions in each scene is incredibly sensory. The way sound shapes the final experience of a film is always astonishing to me.
Is there anything else you would like people to know about your work or “Play Along” in general?
As a young artist (24), I’m still learning a lot through my peers and the experiences I’m gaining from being part of this vibrant filmmaking community. I’m especially excited about the opportunities Montreal offers for emerging artists like myself. It’s been inspiring to be surrounded by so many talented individuals, like those featured in Twelve Vacancies Film Festival and I’m eager to continue growing in this environment.
I hope Play Along resonates with others and serves as a reminder of the strength and resilience that young people can have, even in difficult circumstances. Finally, I look forward to exploring more stories and techniques as I continue to develop my practice.
Some recent films or TV shows that have inspired you recently?
These are some of the pieces of media I think about often :
- Melancholia by Lars Von Trier
- The way the film depicts depression—how it can slowly seep in and take over—is something that has stuck with me. The editing style is also something I admire. Plus, I’m a huge fan of Kirsten Dunst's performance.
- Anora by Sean Baker
- I saw this recently in theaters, and I really appreciated how the three-act structure maintained a cohesive feeling, despite each act having a drastically different tone. The ending left me heartbroken, and the sound direction was exceptional—there was no music, just the sound of the characters in a car, with the windshield wipers squeaking. It felt so raw and intimate
- Over the Garden Wall (series) by Patrick McHale
- This is a fall/winter classic I watch every year, and it never gets old. The symbolism, the mix of disarming silliness with heavy themes, and of course, the music, are all things that draw me in again and again.
