About Cutaway Notes

Cutaway Notes is an independent editorial publication about watching short film with more attention. Our readers are adults who encounter independent Canadian short and documentary work in ordinary settings: alone at a laptop, in a small viewing group, in a community room, or beside a class style discussion. Many are not film students. They want a way in that does not require a glossary.

We publish in three areas. Your One Question deals with choosing a single answerable question before pressing play. Sound and Image offers plain language for describing what a film does with listening, framing and cutting. After the Film covers the conversation that follows, including how to disagree without turning a viewing into a verdict.

Our method is deliberately narrow. Rather than survey a genre or rank titles, each guide isolates one question a viewer can hold across ten to twenty minutes and then talk about honestly. We draw on published Canadian educational writing, including the National Film Board's guidance on facilitating film discussion and on treating sound as a compositional element. We cite what we use and describe where a claim comes from.

We do not claim to have watched or assessed any particular film, and we publish no festival, competition, submission or screening information. Where a guide describes a viewing scenario, it is labelled as hypothetical so readers can apply it to whatever they are actually watching. Illustrations on this site are AI generated and credited as such; they are editorial aids, not documentation of real events or people.