Oscar-Nominated ‘Ice Merchants’ Filmmakers Reveal the ‘Weirdest Thing Ever’ of Awards Season

thewrap.com:

Oscar Nominees Luncheon, where they met filmmakers — like Steven Spielberg — who have inspired them for decades. That was heady enough, but it soon got even more intense for Caetano.“I was heading towards the group photo, walking through the corridor, and at my side, like a meter away from me, Tom Cruise is like, ‘Congratulations!‘” Caetano said, miming the actor’s famous gung-ho energy and double thumbs up. “If (the day) wasn’t surreal enough, having Tom Cruise looking me in the eyes and congratulating me for being for being there was the weirdest thing ever.”The pair can add it to the logbook of their adventure with “Ice Merchants,” a lyrical, 14-minute film with no dialogue about a father and son who live way up on a snowy cliff and each day, parachute into the valley below to sell ice.

Through sound and image alone, the short conveys the deepest of bonds between parent and child, as well as an aching longing for an absent family member.

It all began with the image of a tiny house atop a vertiginous cliff, and from there, Gonzalez — the short’s writer, director, animator and composer — conjured up the rest by jumping from his sketches to his piano and back again until a story emerged from the visuals and music. “Ice Merchants” was the first animated film from Portugal to win a prize at Cannes and it is now the first Portuguese film to be nominated for an Oscar. “When we got to Cannes, it took a long time for us to process.

We were feeling a bit of impostor syndrome — like, what what are we doing here? Somebody made a mistake,” said Gonzalez, a classically trained pianist who has made two previous animated shorts, “Nestor” and “The Voyager.” “It’s gonna take a lot of time to settle in.