A Wordless Story of Loss and Connection in “Ice Merchants”
João Gonzalez’s animated short film “Ice Merchants,” which won a prize at last year’s Cannes Critics’ Week and is short-listed for an Oscar, opens with a stark image: a child playing on a swing outside a house affixed to a sheer rock face. A chasm yawns beneath the child’s feet. Clearly, the kid has nerves of steel, and so does his old man. Every day, father and son harvest ice from their mountain perch and then parachute off their deck to deliver it to the valley dwellers far below. Then, coins in hand, they return to their altitudinous home by means of an ingenious contraption. Hey, it’s a living.
The absurdity of repetitive labor, as well as the comfort of such work, is a theme of the film, but it is not the central theme. Gonzalez, of Portugal, told me over e-mail, “ ‘Ice Merchants’ is a family drama about loss and family connection.” Someone is missing from the ice merchants’ home in the cold mountain air. The absence is symbolized by a yellow mug, one that is never used but often contemplated. Toward the end of the story, as the film dives into the magical and the sublime, the missing family member plays a surprisingly active role in the drama.
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Barring the opening and closing credits, “Ice Merchants” is an endeavor that proceeds entirely without words: “It always came natural to me to make films that don’t use them,” Gonzalez told me. “I enjoy the challenge of portraying emotions and telling stories [only through] images and music/sound as, at least for me, they are able to create more immediate reactions in a more sensorial/physical way.” “Ice Merchants” does have a visceral power—achieved in great part through the workings of Gonzalez’s virtuosic original score. (He is a musician and a composer as well as a filmmaker and an animator.) The music is by turns intense, languorous, full of yearning, otherworldly, halting—not a bad range for the intermittent score of a fourteen-minute film.
“The first thing that comes to me in my process is always an image,” Gonzalez told me, “normally that comes to me while I am daydreaming, sleeping or about to fall asleep. In this case it was a tiny house attached to a tall cliff.” The sense of isolation suggested by that image might seem stressful, but Gonzalez has a tranquil take on the predicament of his animated family: “I find loneliness very peaceful and a lot of my dreams are just me exploring places by myself.”
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January 04, 2023 at 06:02PM
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A Wordless Story of Loss and Connection in “Ice Merchants” - The New Yorker
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