 IRISH SHORTS @ IFIThis screening includes Andrew Kavanagh’s IFB-funded animation, Hasan Everywhere, about a friendship between an Israeli writer and a Palestinian artist exiled in New York. 6 minutes. Canadian maestro Atom Egoyan returns to form with this intelligent and provocative meditation on identity, communications technology and the post-9/11 world. Egoyan’s muse Arsinée Khanjian plays a Toronto French teacher, who picks as a translation exercise a news item about an Arab terrorist who planted a bomb in the airline luggage of his pregnant Irish girlfriend. Student Devon Bostick takes the story and through it examines his own family’s troubled past by pretending the terrorist was his own father. Soon internet chat rooms are buzzing, since he hasn’t let it slip that it’s untrue. ?Like the great Egoyan films of yore, this is about troubled individuals seeking meaning from places and objects in their lives, though this modern spin shows how the white noise of user-generated content, and the ubiquitous presence of ideologicawl tensions complicate that process. A thoughtful, elegantly framed film whose implications stay with you long after its closing credits, it’s certainly his best since The Sweet Hereafter. Notes by Trevor Johnston 
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