Up-and-coming film directors are usually lucky to have one short film making waves for them.

Right now Victoria filmmakers Ana de Lara has two. In Control, a short film about a boy dealing with domestic violence and First Winter Last, a short film about a young Filipino girl in Canada, have both already caught the eye of the film community.

In Control recently won the Making a Difference - Best Children’s Film Award at the 2008 Commffest Film Festival in Toronto and premiered at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival earlier this month. First Winter Last is currently in the semi-finals of the online Radio Canada International’s Migrations Competition, which pits short films from around the country against each other.

De Lara was also approached by a producer who saw In Control at the Asian Film Festival, and has asked her to write a feature-length script.

“There’s been a lot of films about domestic violence but what this producer was intrigued about was that this film was strictly from a child’s perspective,” said de Lara, who has done filmmaking workshops at the Gulf Island Film and Television school and CineVic, where she is also currently president. “So it had that sense of innocence but also sort of kept it real.”

In Control follows a young boy who escapes from an abusive father using a remote control and his imagination. There’s no dialogue in the film, however the film tells an encompassing story about how kids deal with traumatic events in their life.

For First Winter Last de Lara used her own personal experience of immigrating to Victoria from the Philippines when she was young.

“I moved to Victoria when I was seven and a half and it was in December and this was back in the 70s when we actually got snow,” said de Lara, who submitted an updated, reanimated version of the short for the Radio Canada contest. “And there’s a potato field and in the winter it would actually freeze over and flood. And I saw a dead crow in the ice, and it was my first time seeing ice and snow and also a dead bird up that close, so it was really fascinating to me.”

After she saw the crow, de Lara said two other young white girls approached her and called her a racial slur, something she used as a theme in First Winter Last.

“They actually called me chink, but I didn’t know what it meant, but I kind of knew it wasn’t a nice thing to be called because they were kind of mean about it and laughing. But it was sort of an awkward laugh possibly because I didn’t react, I was just sort of confused so they just laughed awkwardly and walked away.”

Filming it in 2006 proved a difficult challenge though. Little snow during the winter meant they had to wait for a call from a contact at Mount Washington before racing up to shoot. But when they returned they noticed film of the little girl had been destroyed accidentally, however de Lara, showing signs of a competent director, ad-libbed a scene with the young girl’s mother who was also at the shoot, and ended up incorporating her into the story as the older version of the young girl.

“We ended up putting the mother in it and I ended up having to write the poem that was in it,” she said. “Which was originally only like six lines or something and the actual piece is like four and a half minutes long so it ended up being a visual poem, so the poetry was harder than the filming for me because I hadn’t written any poetry since high school.”

Currently online at Radio Canada International’s Migr@tions Competition the film has already moved pass the first round of voting and anyone can check it out and vote for it from . Comments from voters call the short film “intriguing”, “beautiful” and that it “gets to the heart of the matter.”

In terms of professional inspiration, de Lara said she really enjoys the comedy stylings of Woody Allen’s films, American director Todd Solondz (*Happiness*, *Welcome to the Dollhouse*) and *Turtles Can Fly*, a film that follows Iraqi children during the U.S. led invasion in 2003. De Lara said she hopes to bring the same truthfulness to her movies.

“That’s an inspiration for me just to be honest and to have the courage to tell stories the way they really are,” she said.

You can view *First Winter Last* and vote for it online until Nov. 26 at http://www.rciviva.ca/rci/migrations/flash.asp?lg=en&id_concours=8.

patrickb@vicnews.com