Short Animation

Slow Light — Kijek/Adamski | 2022

The programme opens with Slow Light by the Polish duo Kasia Kijek and Przemek Adamski. It tells the tale of a boy born with eyes so dense that it takes seven years for light to reach his retinas. At seven, blind, while playing with a toy car, he sees for the first time: the darkness cracks and stop-motion gives way to pencil on paper as we see, from his point of view, the mobile hanging above his crib as a newborn. His entire life follows this disconnect: what he lives and what he sees remain forever at odds, and the boy becomes a man who cannot escape his past, and consequently remains forever immature. Slow Light's story is captivating, but it is its impressive style that really shines. A mixture of colourful stop-motion cutouts portrays his physical life, while black and white pencil animations depict his past. Impressively, a team of artists spent seven months painting the estimated 90,000 cardboard cutouts used in production, with COLA animators Ala Nunu, João Gonzalez, and Jakub Kazmarek bringing to life the boy's hand-drawn past.

AHEAD — Ala Nunu | 2020

Next is the surreal, contemplative Ahead by Ala Nunu, a film which asks the question, "can you fix something that doesn't want to be fixed?" Ahead is a short story about living with, and as, a headless person.

Telsche — Sophie Colfer and Ala Nunu | 2023

Telsche premiered in June 2023 at the prestigious Annecy Film Festival. Set on a vast expanse of salt flats under slow-moving clouds, Telsche is a film about memory and loss. These concepts are reflected visually in the contrast between light and dark, in the symbolic obscuring of clouds, and in the choice of still, wide shots, wherein the subjects are barely visible, on the verge of being seen but as of yet unremembered. Like Ahead before it, Telsche is rendered in clean 2D animation and juxtaposes quiet, minimal interiors with lush, wild nature.

Ice Merchants — João Gonzalez | 2022 [Nominated for 2023 Academy Award Best Short Animated Film, Winner 2023 Annie Awards]

The programme wraps with Ice Merchants, the poignant short that took Portugal to the Oscars for the first time in 2023. Ice Merchants is a 14-minute 2D film about a father and son, who perform an impossible daily leap off their cliffside house and fall, parachuted, to sell ice to villagers far below. It presents us with a series of vertiginous images: the small boy swings in the morning over a chasm. The low clouds drift below, and in the distance we see the small town that they must journey to each day. Father and son follow a quiet, charming routine, and all the while we feel the presence of someone who isn't there. Such is the world Ice Merchants presents, a perilous, yet oddly tranquil life that soon slides out of control. Expertly animated by COLA's João Gonzalez and Ala Nunu, with a score composed by Gonzalez, orchestrated by Nuno Lobo, and performed by a group of musicians from ESMAE (Porto's Music College), Ice Merchants showcases the best of Portugal's young creative talent.

Panel / Q&A

Bruno Caetano, Ala Nunu, Vier Nev, João Gonzalez

Moderated by Sophie Colfer.