Oscar-Contending Short ‘Perfectly A Strangeness’ Takes Audience To Desert Terrain Of Donkeys And Cosmic Observatories

One of the most cinematic documentaries of the year comes in short form, with no dialogue.

Alison McAlpine’s Oscar contender perfectly a strangenesswinner of more than a dozen awards at film festivals around the world, runs a spare 15 minutes.

“I wanted to tell a tall tale without any dialogue,” McAlpine tells Deadline, “and play with, for me, the basic elements of cinema — shadow, light, sound, reflections.”

The tale follows three equine companions – Palomo, Ruperto and Palaye – as they amble through mountainous terrain and into an unexpected installation.

“Three donkeys are in an unnamed desert,” the filmmaker explains, “and they discover an abandoned, astronomical observatory, and the universe.”

The idea for the short sprang from an earlier long-form project McAlpine directed. “I did a feature film in the same area… You’d go to these incredible observatories at 3,000 meters [elevation] and above and you’d often see many donkeys, like a dozen donkeys. Some of them were wild, I think, and some of them were domestic, I think that got together. But apparently these plains in the Atacama Desert [of northern Chile] you can find, I don’t know what you call ‘posses’ of donkeys.”

The documentary invites viewers to imagine this landscape from a non-human perspective.

“Seeing these donkeys and grazing besides these billion-dollar beasts, these metallic domes, I just asked a question, how do they see this world?” McAlpine says. “And then of course there was [the question]how do we replicate it if I’m going for this perspective of a donkey? Using anamorphic lenses and we shine the light on the donkey’s eyes. [The eyes] were fascinating because some of them are actually galaxies inside, though they look dark to our eyes. 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.”

The film also shifts periodically to another non-human perspective – that of the gigantic observatories themselves as the donkeys clop, clop, clop their way around them. At moments, the filmmaker takes us inside the structures.

“All the interior shots are shot in an observatory called Paranal further north than the observatory called La Silla, which looks more abandoned, and that [Paranal] is a much more modern observatory,” McAlpine notes. “I wanted the sense of the guts, kind of the visceral guts of this observatory… Those instruments had never been filmed before, so it was quite an honor.”

Ben Grossman composed the ethereal score. “He’s a hurdy gurdy player, quite known internationally, and he’s an improviser. And I really wanted a sound that felt improvised,” McAlpine says. “With Ben, it was hurdy gurdy, tuba, and these bells — I call them bells, but they’re really these metal pieces that he has that some instrument maker made for him. I wanted something that people didn’t recognize as normal violins in a film score or something that was non-identifiable… I wanted a soundscape that felt open and sort of neutral, that just felt that we hadn’t heard it before.”

Perfectly a strangeness premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. It won Best Documentary Short at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in North Carolina, Best Canadian Short Film at the Planet in Focus festival in Toronto, and Best Short at Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois in Montréal, among many other prizes. At the Toronto International Film Festival, it was named to Canada’s Top 10 Shorts.

“I’ve been very honored and humbled to receive really enthusiastic support from certain audience members,” McAlpine shares. “They’re transported in a way they haven’t been transported before, which is a huge compliment. And they are open to this hybrid between documentary and fiction, which it really is. I wrote a treatment [for it] in kind of four movements, and not that I’m a composer, but I had a very simple story I wanted to tell, [and] really like a jazz score that I wanted of the donkeys going from the plains up the hill, exploring the observatory, then the observatory comes to life.”

McAlpine was a poet before she became a filmmaker. Her language in perfectly a strangeness is visual.

“It is a cinematic poem really for me, this film or tall tale,” she says. “It gives the audience space to imagine, space to breathe and imagine.”