To watch The Annual Crafts & Arts Contest is to be engulfed in a black-and-white world, where men play women and women play men. There is no dialogue—only intense violin music with frenzied crescendos when emotions run high. Jonas Bell Pasht, 22, the Toronto director and writer of this 30-minute film, has been making movies since high school.
Bell Pasht is a bit of a rebel when it comes to filmmaking: “It was a big risk for it [The Annual Crafts & Arts Contest] to be silent, for the casting decisions, for it to be in black and white, for it to be accompanied by a violin—but that’s great. I like taking risks.”
He also enjoys the mixed reactions to the film. Some people find it funny while others take it seriously. “I think it’s great to have one woman dressed as a man, one man dressed as a woman and have all this absurdity. But for it to actually be a sad story is a big success,” he says.
Eugene Draw is the eccentric violinist who helped amplify emotions in the film. When Bell Pasht first met Draw, the violinist suddenly stood up in a packed café and began to play. Bell Pasht was inspired at that moment and recruited him for his movie.
Cinematographer, Matt Lyon, and engineer, Kevin Kelly, also helped set the mood in the film. They transferred the edited piece from digital form onto film. The result, Bell Pasht says, was “this really contrasting and really grainy but sharp image.”
His first film, In November, 1943, was an eight-minute short about his late grandmother, Sarah Pasht, who was a Holocaust survivor, which aired in 1999 on America’s HBO Family Channel. After In November, Bell Pasht directed and co-wrote The Making of A Divine Film with classmate Jaan Kittask—a no-budget 24-minute satire which poked fun at the film industry—while still at Toronto’s Northern Secondary high school in 1999.
Liane Balaban, who went on to star in movies like The New Waterford Girl in 1999, first played a dead body in A Divine Film. Balaban helped Bell Pasht come up with the idea for The Annual Crafts & Arts Contest. In the film, Balaban plays Neilburt, a quiet, geeky man who is in love with his almost abusive ex-girlfriend, Betty-Anna, played by Jay Shuster. Bell Pasht plays Klaus, a man obsessed with winning his apartment building’s annual craft contest. When Neilburt moves in and signs up for the contest, Klaus is consumed with fear that he will not win this year.
Bell Pasht, who is in the fourth year of the film program at Ryerson University, says that the film is about obsession and obsessive relationships; two things he can relate to. “I let little things eat away at me. It could be something I say or do that to others may seem insignificant, but it can haunt me for days,” he reveals.
He can relate to Neilburt and how he suffers for what he thinks is love. He admits to having been in relationships that are “hugely imbalanced, to the point of absurdity.”
“I think that we all have symbolic ‘annual crafts and arts contests’ that we sweat over, but we almost never take the time to step back and say: Who the hell cares about and annual crafts and arts contest anyway?”
