Oh girls, what have you done?  In “The Old Woman in the Woods”, the longest of the films playing in today’s Made in B.C. shorts program at the International Film Festival for Youth, two young sisters are tempted into naughtier and naughtier behaviour by a hectoring crone they find sitting on tree stump. They should know better, but she’s got something inside a little wooden box that the girls really want to see.

Brenda Macdonald makes an impressively toothless creation out of the old woman. She’s more truculent than either of the young sisters, telling them “… to be really naughty, that takes a great deal of grown up talent indeed,” in this beautifully shot fable, adapted by writer-director Caroline Coutts from Lucy Lane Clifford’s 19^th century fairy tale, “The New Mother”.

An what’s inside the box? A tiny prince and princess, which Coutts depicts with sparing but effective stop-motion animation. Like the girls, we want to see more of it, making us complicit in the grim fate that awaits. Coutts’ film also provides the darkest (and mossiest) thrills in the program, which hews strongly towards animation.

Of the rest, two of the standouts include Eric Bates’ eye-popping “Sayonara”, with its odd little tale of rising sea levels, and a gorgeous hand drawn rendering of the Chinese traditional song “The Moon is High in the Heaven” from master animator Joe Chang.

Made in B.C. screens at the Vancity Theatre today (April 13) at 8:30 PM, with filmmaker Caroline Coutts in attendance