Ice Merchants

João Gonzalez's Ice Merchants (Os Mercadores do Gelo) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2023, Portugal's first Oscar nomination in the whole history of the Awards. The 14-minute short was Gonzalez's diploma project at the Royal College of Art in London, made over four years on a tiny budget with three credited animators. The year before, the Annecy International Animated Film Festival had given it a major prize.

A father and son live alone in a tiny wooden house improbably bolted to the side of a sheer mountain cliff. Each day they parachute from the front door to the village far below, where they sell the ice they harvest on the cliff face, and in the evening they come back up by a cable system along the mountainside. Their working and domestic routine is presented as ritual: the morning preparation, the harvest, the village customers, the evening return. There is no dialogue, and the story's central turn is told entirely in images.

Gonzalez draws in hand-made 2D with a slightly geometric look, close to Russian children's-book illustration, and his style is among the most distinctive in recent independent European animation. For a fourteen-minute short its reach has been considerable, and festivals still programme it. In Portugal the Oscar nomination was treated as a small national event, and the Annie Awards, the BAFTA shortlist and the Academy Award nomination carried the film far beyond the country.