Winnipeggers' short film lands kudos from Glee star at TIFF

A former Glee star is a fan of a Winnipeg quartet's short film that screened at the Toronto International Film Festival last week.

The filmmakers behind Imitations — Ian Bawa, 30, Milos Mitrovic, 26, Markus Henkel, 28, and Fabian Velasco, 28 — said they got to chat with Blake Jenner after their last screening on Sunday.

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"Last screening, I went to do my Q&A, and it's all the short filmmakers from all the different films, and I got a question from Blake Jenner from Glee," Mitrovic told CBC News on Tuesday.

"Then he waited for us outside of the theatre and talked to us and just loved the film."

Jenner, who played Ryder Lynn in the popular musical comedy-drama series, is in The Edge of Seventeen, which made its world premiere as TIFF's closing night film on Saturday.

Imitations is a 10-minute film that follows Arnold, a super-fan obsessed with Austin Kelsey, a pop star similar to Justin Bieber.

Arnold, who is played by Mitrovic, undergoes plastic surgery to look like Kelsey, and the dark comedy evolves from there.

"Things go horribly wrong, as his face starts slowly falling off," Bawa explained.

Imitations screened on Sept. 9 and 10 as well as on Sunday morning at the Toronto festival, which ranks alongside Cannes and Sundance as one of the top film festivals in the world.

Fan obsession on the red carpet

The film pokes fun at pop culture and fans' obsession with celebrities — two things Mitrovic and Bawa observed while they were at TIFF.

"You walk by the red carpet constantly and then you're like, 'Oh my God, a sea of people,' and then you're trying to swim through and people are just looking at Johnny Depp, like, 'Johnny! Johnny! It's me, Matt!' So it's weird," Bawa said.

Mitrovic said he spoke at the film Q&A about how people shouldn't take pop culture too seriously, citing his own red-carpet observations at TIFF.

"There's this square area where there's like a million people and they're waiting for Chris Pratt and all these celebrities to come out of their vans or whatever.… There's so many people [and] nobody knows who's coming," Mitrovic said.

"You go up to them and go, 'Who's coming?' And everybody says, 'Well, I don't know.' And then I'm like, 'Why are you here, then?' And this is what it's like — it's like people are waiting to see somebody. But it's also anticlimactic in the end, because they look like people."

Mitrovic said having their film recognized on a major stage has been a confidence booster.

"You're looking for validation as an artist of any kind, so when you get that, your confidence goes up," Mitrovic said.

"What it could do for us professionally, I don't really know. I mean, I don't think that some big-time producer is going to come up to us and be like, 'Here's a billion dollars, make a billion-dollar movie,' but I do think that this could help open doors for other film festivals, which is always really good."

The Winnipeggers will be showing Imitations at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, before they head to the Vancouver International Film Festival at the end of this month.