EXCLUSIVE: Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Alison McAlpine made the most of her recent visit to Los Angeles for the Oscar Luncheon. While in town earlier this month, the Montreal-based director of perfectly a strangeness went on a couple of shoots. And she didn’t go alone.
As readers of Deadline know, McAlpine’s documentary short “stars” three donkeys — Palomo, Ruperto and Palaye – who amble about a mountainous terrain absent human presence. The burros come across an abandoned cosmic observatory, and we are invited to imagine the striking sight from the animals’ perspective.
Visiting LA, McAlpine once again collaborated, as it were, with a donkey, bringing one of the equine creatures to the Griffith Observatory as well as to the nearby Hollywood sign to highlight the necessity for independent cinema. In the mini video below, the burro is first heard off camera, then seen on screen below the iconic sign in the Hollywood hills which has a couple of words appended to it – instead of the name of the town alone, it reads, “Hollywood Needs Strangeness.”
Perfectly a strangeness indeed was made independently and only recently acquired by the Criterion Channel, which plans to begin streaming it on the platform in March. As we reported in December, perfectly a strangeness unspools wordlessly, for a spare 15 minutes.
“I wanted to tell a tall tale without any dialogue,” McAlpine told Deadline. “And play with, for me, the basic elements of cinema — shadow, light, sound, reflections.”
It’s not revealed in the film itself, but McAlpine notes that she made the film in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile, which features more than one outcropping of titanic telescopes.
While working on an earlier film in the area, McAlpine had noticed groups of donkeys wandering about – some presumably wild and others perhaps domesticated but now on their own.
“Seeing these donkeys grazing besides these billion-dollar beasts, these metallic domes, I jasked a question, how do they see this world?” the director told Deadline. “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. But it’s really as if a child, or in this case a donkey, is discovering the universe for the first time — a universe being the tactile surroundings of this apparently abandoned observatory, devoid of humans, and of course the universe of the night sky.”
Perfectly a strangeness, an Indie arts council funded film, premiered in official competition at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, then traveled to TIFF, IDFA, and over 80 international film festivals. It has won over 20 awards around the world leading up to its 2026 nomination for Best Documentary Short at the 98th Academy Awards.
Watch the mini video shot beneath the Hollywood sign here:
English (US) ·