Oscar for Best Animated Short Goes to Favorite The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the horseby Charlie Mackesy and Matthew Freud, passing alongside the Portuguese Ice Merchantsthe film by João Gonzalez and the COLA cooperative.
It wasn’t this one. Ice Merchants, the film by João Gonzalez produced by Bruno Caetano, was the first Portuguese film to be nominated for an Oscar. But it turned out to be a BBC and Apple production, with JJ Abrams producing, winning.
João Gonzalez and Bruno Caetano, the film’s producer, did not hide in an interview with PÚBLICO after winning the Annie award in the same category, that they identified themselves with an independent school film, the Australian ostrichby Lachlan Pendragon, among his Oscar contenders.
Is that Ice Merchants is the final project for the MA in Animation at the Royal College of Arts in London, which Gonzalez has continued to develop during the pandemic. And it was in this way that the first Portuguese film nominated for the Oscars became a 14-minute short that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week and was the first Portuguese animated film to win the Leitz Cine Discovery at the most prestigious festival. of cinema in the world.
Ice Merchants is the story of a father and son who live isolated on top of a mountain and who every day parachute to sell the ice they collect to the village at the foot of the mountain. Without dialogues, but with music by João Gonzalez, who is also a trained instrumentalist, it nevertheless won an honor that means media coverage and also the expectation of greater international dissemination for Portuguese animation cinema.