Toronto 2015 Review: Short Doc WORLD FAMOUS GOPHER HOLE MUSEUM Offers A Beautiful, Bizarre And Tragic Slice Of Life

Though it runs only twenty minutes, Chelsea McMullan and Douglas Nayler's World Famous Gopher Hole Museum makes an over sized impression. Finding a deeply human soul in its even more deeply quirky subject matter, all of it presented flawlessly in a quietly understated yet deeply evocative style, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum evokes the very best work of Errol Morris while marking McMullan and Nayler as significant young talents to watch.

Home to only some two hundred residents the small Canadian town of Torrington, Alberta has garnered a certain fame for a different sort of population. Because Torrington, since 1996, Torrington has also been home to the Gopher Hole Museum - an oddball collection of dioramas of minaturized town life populated entirely with taxidermied gophers assembled in various poses as they embrace the full range of what Torrington has to offer. Romance! Industry! Travel! It's a whole way of life, captured and exemplified by these furry little creations, on display for four months of the year for the low, low admission price of just two dollars.

It's an unusual place to be sure, and while World Famous Gopher Hole Museum is certainly not shy about using the general level of weirdness to quickly hook its audience it takes just moments to realize that McMullan and Nayler are up to something far more significant than mere oddball cultural tourism here. As we meet the creators of the museum and residents of the town the film takes on a more mournful tone, playing as a sort of wistful elegy. For as odd as the Museum may be what it captures and represents is the passing of an era, as though its creators have realized that the world has largely passed them by and if they do not do something to make their lives memorable then they risk simply slipping away and being forgotten forever.

McMullan and Nayler handle their material here with grace and charm and - like Morris in early work such as Gates Of Heaven and Fast, Cheap And Out Of Control - find a truly universal and deeply empathetic soul to their subjects. Given that it is a short documentary, not suited for theatrical or broadcast release, it's hard to say when broader audiences may have the chance to experience World Famous Gopher Hole Museum but I can only hope that it is soon and that it is only the first volley of what is hopefully a long and varied career for its creators.