EXCLUSIVE: Criterion Channel has acquired Alison McAlpine’s Oscar-nominated short documentary perfectly a strangeness, winner of multiple awards around the world. The streaming platform plans a March debut for the film that features a trio of non-human leads.
“In the dazzling incandescence of an unknown desert,” reads its logline, “three donkeys discover an abandoned astronomical observatory and the universe. A sensorial, cinematic exploration of what a story can be.”
McAlpine, a poet and filmmaker based in Montreal, takes a distinctive visual approach to the documentary, at times adopting the point of view of the donkeys, at other times shifting to the towering perspective of the monolithic telescopes.
“The whole film happens in 24 hours, from dawn to dawn the next day,” McAlpine explained in a recent interview with Deadline. “I wanted to tell a tall tale without any dialogue and play with, for me, the basic elements of cinema — shadow, light, sound, reflections.”
McAlpine shot the film in the Atacama Desert in Chile, a place she had visited previously, noticing the landscape was inhabited by many donkeys. “Some of them were wild, I think, and some of them were domestic, I think that got together,” she noted. “Seeing these donkeys grazing besides these billion-dollar beasts, these metallic domes, I asked a question, how do they see this world? And then of course there was [the question], how do we replicate the perspective of a donkey? We used anamorphic lenses. We also shone a simple light in a donkey’s eye, and it was fascinating because to our naked eye a donkey’s eye is dark and opaque and yet with a simple light, some donkeys’ eyes are like galaxies. So, it was an exploration of that universe.”
Perfectly a strangeness, produced by Second Sight Pictures in association with GreenGround Productions, is currently streaming in Canada on the Crave platform. The documentary has screened at over 80 international film festivals, winning over 20 awards, including the Grand Prize at Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Silver Hugo Documentary Short Film at the Chicago International Film Festival, Canada’s Top 10 TIFF, Best Short Documentary Special Mention at IDA Documentary Awards, the Full Frame Jury Award for Best Short, and a nomination for Best Short Nonfiction at Cinema Eye Honors, in addition to its nomination for Best Documentary Short at the 98th Academy Awards.
Regarding the acquisition deal, McAlpine said in a statement, “It is a filmmaker’s dream to have one’s film stream on the Criterion Channel. I am truly honored that perfectly a strangeness will join such a beautifully curated selection of titles.”
Criterion Channel boasts a selection of thousands of fiction and nonfiction films. It describes itself as “a streaming service dedicated to classic and contemporary cinema, featuring an ever-evolving lineup of films from around the world, presented in high-quality editions with curated programming and special features.”
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