João Gonzalez keeps winning international awards with his film "Ice Merchants"
This weekend he won the Annie award, considered the "Oscar of animation", in the Best Short Film category, during the 50th edition of the most important awards of animation cinema in the United States, a ceremony that took place early Sunday morning in Los Angeles, and also received yesterday the audience award at the International Animated Film Festival - Anima, in Brussels.
The young director from Oporto sees thus crowned a year of enormous success with the 14-minute short film: Cannes Film Festival, Curtas de Vila do Conde, Guadalajara, Melbourne, Chicago, St. Louis, Alcine, BendFilm, Anim'est and Spark, 41 other awards and special mentions and more than 90 official selections in festivals around the world, an already historical scenario in Portuguese cinema. What's missing is the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, to be handed out on March 12, in an unprecedented nomination for a Portuguese production.
"If you count the days in a row, [Ice Merchants] took around a year, which is not much for an animated film. With the breaks and pandemic it took two years," revealed João Gonzalez, in a recent interview in Porto.
"Portuguese animation cinema, specifically, is one of the strongest in the world. Sometimes we feel that there is more promotion internationally than in our country," the young director added to Expresso.
"Ice Merchants", João Gonzalez' third film (before that he directed "Nestor" and "The Voyager", also awarded prizes), is about loss and family ties between a father and a son, and its starting point is the image of a house on a mountain, leaning over a cliff. Told without narrator or dialogue, only through drawn images and music, it is co-produced by Cola Animation with the UK and France. The film is currently being shown in Portuguese cinemas.
Comentários