Fair warning: You probably want to have seen Gravity, Alfonso Cuaron’s recent spacefaring survival thriller featuring Sandra Bullock, before reading on.
If you have seen the movie, you’ll likely remember a scene where Bullock’s character Ryan Stone briefly makes radio contact with a person unknown. Losing radio contact at the end of the scene prompts Stone to abandon hope of rescue immediately before mission commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) mysteriously reappears to talk her out of suicide.
The character at the other end of the transmission is never seen in Gravity, but Alfonso’s son (and Gravity co-writer) Jonas Cuaron took to Greenland during the production of the feature to shoot a short film which shows exactly who answered Stone’s distress call: an Inuit man named Aningaaq. Intended as a to thematically parallel Stone’s plight in space, Aningaaq is worried about what to do with an dearly loved, but badly aging sled dog.
The short film, titled Aningaaq after its protagonist, is expected to contend for an Oscar nomination in the short film category, which could give rise to a rare, if not unprecedented, occurrence: not only would it be nominations for a father/son pair, but nominations for two different films which include the same conversation.
See Aningaaq in its entirety below (courtesy of THR):
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