João González’s Portuguese film The Ice Traders won the award for Best Animated Short Film in the Melbourne International Film Festival’s competition, as decided by the jury of the event announced in the Australian city.

This is the “third qualifying prize” for the Portuguese director’s film as a candidate for an Oscar nomination, underlines the Short Film Agency presenting the work, “highlighting its place on the shortlist for the 2023 Hollywood Awards.”

The short film “Ice Traders” has already been awarded at the Critics’ Week, this year at the Cannes Film Festival, at the Guadalajara Festival in Mexico, at the Motovun Festival in Croatia and at the Curtas Festival in Vila do Conde.

A film about a father and son who make ice in the inhospitable house they live in and from which they skydive every day to sell it in a village at the foot of a mountain.

Joao Gonzalez was born in Porto in 1996. He is a director, animator, illustrator and classically trained musician on the piano. He received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and studied at the Royal College of Art in London, after graduating from the Higher School of Media Arts and Design.

His first films, Nestor and Voyager, were still filmed in an academic context, adding “more than 20 awards (…) and more than 130 official film festival selections,” the Short Film Agency says.

Joao Gonzalez is also writing the screenplay and soundtrack for The Ice Dealers.

The director is “very interested in combining his musical ‘background’ with his animation practice, always taking on the role of composer and sometimes instrumentalist on the films he directs, sometimes accompanying them with ‘live performances’,” the agency said.

In addition to “Ice Traders”, the short films “Becoming Human in the Middle Ages” by Pedro Neves Marquez and “Tourment (Tourment sur les iles)” by Spanish director Albert Serra and “Tout le monde aime Jeanne” by French director Céline Deveaux, co-produced by Portugal, in section of feature films, as well as “Forbidden to Dogs and Italians” by French director Alain Ughetto, in the program of animation feature films.

The festival also featured “Diários de Otsoga” by Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gómez and “Fogo-Fátuo” by João Pedro Rodrigues.

The jury for the 70th festival included directors Tiriki Onus and James Vaughan, as well as critic Jourdain Searles.

This year’s awards also included Bangladeshi director Nuhash Humayun’s Moshari as Best Short Feature Film and China’s Shuli Huang’s Will You Look at Me as Best Documentary Short Film. The prize for the best experimental short film went to “Nazarbazi” by Maryam Tafakori, a young director from Iran.

The awards ceremony took place on Thursday in Melbourne and was attended by Joao Gonzalez.

The Melbourne Film Festival, the largest and oldest in Australian cinema, began on the 4th and will run until the 28th with both online and in-room screenings.

Read too

American actress Anne Heche “shouldn’t survive” after a severe traumatic brain injury. car accident in Los Angeles last weekreports the American press.

The crash left Heche, 53, in a coma with “severe anoxic brain injury,” according to a statement by one of his representatives, which was quoted by several media outlets.

“She has long decided to donate her organs and is being kept on life support to determine if they are viable,” the statement said.

Her rep also thanked Heche’s supporters as well as those caring for the actress at the Grossman Burn Center at West Hills Hospital.

“Anna had a huge heart and touched everyone she met with her generous spirit,” the statement said.

“More than her extraordinary talent, she spread kindness and joy as her life’s work. She will be remembered for her courageous honesty and will be greatly missed for her light.”

It should be noted that Anne Heche has been in a coma since she crashed her car into a two-story house in the Mar Vista area on August 5. The LAPD later said they would refer Heche for a blood test and that investigators intended to “bring this case to the appropriate prosecutor,” although they did not elaborate on the charge.

However, on the same day, local media reported that preliminary drug tests had come back positive. The sensational expert website TMZ, citing police sources, even assured that Heche tested positive for cocaine and fentanyl.

Heche excelled in film in the 90s, with films such as Six Days, Seven Nights, Donnie Brasco and I Know What You Did Last Summer. She was also known for her role in Underworld, for which she received a Daytime Emmy Award in 1991.

In the 1990s, he was in a relationship with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.