GLASS CEILING is a vibrant and stimulating programme of short films, featuring friendship, the office grind, moments in teenage life and the journey to adulthood, and the liminal spaces at both ends of relationships. It includes several genres, and has a lot of comedic elements in films with a range of new stories. As the title implies, there are several female directors/writers, and women as central characters.

We start BY THE POOL (Karine Belanger, 15 min), and spectate from a distance through a summer season at an outdoor pool, as the bright blues turn to muddy greens. The young lifeguards are the focus for our conscious observation, handling mundane and dramatic tasks and letting off steam with traditional teenage behaviour – who hasn’t gone to their parents’ liquor cabinet and lifted something exotic like melon brandy? The saturated summer colours and some comically absurd moments make this a gentle pleasure to watch. It’s light on dialogue, strong on visuals.

SINGLE (SEULE) (Mélanie Charbonneau, 9 mins), like BY THE POOL, is a French Canadian film, but full of conversation as Annie tries to deal with her recent breakup amid the frustrations of setting up a new house alone – talking to friends on the phone while almost encaged in half-constructed pieces of furniture, or squashed on a low couch to talk to her aloof counsellor in some scenes that had most of the audience giggling. Annie wants support and loyalty, but Facebook makes transparent her friends’ ongoing interactions with her ex, and the battle for Likes and social status plays a large part in this comedy. The filmmakers wanted to show how technology changes the relationship between people; that the “out of sight, out of mind” advice in breakups is now impossible to achieve within social media circles.

In another everyday house, a man is shaving, but black tar drips eerily down the walls and is malevolently smeared into evil pentagrams because tonight is ALLHALLOWTIDE (Tia Salisbury, 9 mins) and the place is haunted. A classic horror opener, but this turns into a touching, sweet, funny story. Quite charming. Set in the UK, with a pragmatic British attitude to having a ghost in the house.

DRAWN TOGETHER (Victoria Howell, 15 mins) mixes live action and animation, as two attendees of a weekly corporate seminar don’t speak but form a bond through the doodles they do while bored, which come to life on each others’ pages and share adventures. We wonder if they will manage a meetcute in real life. Good music and sound, creating distance from the tedious motivation presentations and allowing a special space for the couple’s imaginative creations.

What is appropriate attire for superhero sidekicks? And who is the sidekick anyway? Zoey negotiates these questions on her first day in the heroing business. THE DYNAMIC DOUBLE STANDARD (Luke Patton, 5 mins) is a single joke but carries it off well, with confident performances and a comedy pratfall from an unexpected quarter.

FAN GIRL (Kate Herron, 16 mins) takes us back to those heady days of pop star worship, clipping pictures from magazines and dreaming of meeting your idol. A decade has passed and childhood friends Emily and Kim are following through on a pact to take the fan club trip to visit the house of dreamy Ryan Laughtner – but they have fallen out of touch and grown apart in the meantime and it isn’t the rekindling of that teenage closeness they’d hoped for. It is delightfully awkward, and the shifts from exhilaration to bathos are played to humorous effect while always maintaining the emotional connection to the pair who are trying to quash their disappointment – at each other, and at *Ryan!!!*, played seedily by Steve Oram. 90s pop nostalgia fans will love the original score and the boy band photo shoot.

A comedy noir, set largely in the oranges and browns of a well-realised 1970s office, SARAH CHONG IS GOING TO KILL HERSELF (Ella Jones, 15 min) is a tale of a previous employee told to a new receptionist – as a cautionary tale or an inspiration to insurrection? Office life changes over the years, but the company’s urban myths remain. There’s an odd logic to the story, it feels like a classic myth structure but it doesn’t match a journey I’ve seen before, Sarah goes somewhere new and it was refreshing to watch her forge this path. Her variously dysfunctional colleagues are played well, and there are good appearances from Helen Lederer and Steve Oram (again). The filmmakers have chosen a heightened reality, high detail approach, much like Wes Anderson, and talked afterwards about how their choices in set design and planometric staging contributed to this effect. A great watch.

THE WHEEL (Samia Rida, 5 mins) is a witty end to the programme, taking an instantly recognizable modern scenario and transplanting it to the caveman era, as Rida (who stars as well as directing) rehearses a sales pitch for a new gizmo she’s developed. The throwaway ideas in the credits sequence elevate it. A great example of the sort of film that can be shot in a day in a local wood, with a strong simple idea and good performances.

[THE MIRROR (Tahereh Ahmadishad) was advertised but not shown due to technical problems]

See the Glass Ceiling shorts at the repeat showing on Tue 25 Oct at 10:50pm.

httpvh://youtu.be/kS9HkMBzVO8