Curtas presents the exhibit “Ice Merchants: from Subconscious to the Screen”, by João Gonzalez, as part of the New Voices programme, a sidebar dedicated to emerging auteurs of contemporary cinema. “Ice Merchants”, which won the Portuguese Competition of Curtas’ last edition, was an unique case in the history of Portuguese cinema, with a record number of international awards and an unprecedented Oscar nomination, in the Best Animated Short Film category.

The exhibit, on display at Vila do Conde’s City Auditorium, portrays the aesthetic mutations that “Ice Merchants” underwent over time, from the pre-production stage, specifically the original storyboard, images of character studies, the first sketch of the house and its 3D modeling, side by side with character sheets, character proportions, and the creation process of the original soundtrack. Through these materials, we get to know João Gonzalez’s creative thinking in the way he designed the characters and conveyed them in a beautiful and coherent narrative, in which love and drama inhabit the memory of presence. We are also shown the original way in which the filmmaker structured his harmony around the logical subversion of proportions, the possibilities of the chromatic palette, the rhetoric of colors (from temperature to emotion), the anachronism of sizes and frames, the hyperbolization of the hand, the perspective, the points of view and shots, the distance and proximity, the interior and exterior of the house, the balance between the size of body members, the iterative power of the bell, the step and the toss on the swing, the balance of the arm during the flight of the protagonist-airplane and the coziness of the protagonist-passenger of affections, in the rods that support the house and detach it from the flow of time, when the temperature is steady and when it changes, with nothing being unpredictable and everything surprising us. The exhibit includes drawings, graphic elements, the making of different stages of production, and a screening of the film in a movie theater.