Enjoy a Quixotic quest through the Atacama Desert as three donkeys make their way to an observatory in perfectly a strangeness. This offbeat film from director Alison McAlpine scored an Oscar nomination this morning for Best Documentary Short. The film is now available to stream on Pleins Écrans. It is also on Crave for subscribers.
After debuting at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, perfectly a strangeness enjoyed a long and healthy run on the festival circuit. The film won Best Canadian Short at Planet in Focus, the Grand Prize at Montreal’s Festival du Nouveau Cinema, Best Documentary Short Film at the Chicago International Film Festival, and Best Short at Full Frame Film Festival, which qualified it for the Oscars. The film also received a Cinema Eye Honors nomination and a special citation at the IDA Awards. It was named to Canada’s Top Ten in 2024 and earned a Canadian Screen Award nomination, among other honours.
The idiosyncratic perfectly a strangeness imagines a fable without dialogue, just music and the clippity-clop of hooves as donkeys traverse the desert. “A family of donkeys [was] standing, just looking at us, and there were these observatory domes in the background,” McAlpine told POV back at TIFF. “I was fascinated by that shot. There were these billion dollar observatories, over 3000 metres, and these donkeys — it was a juxtaposition I found interesting.”
“In just 15 minutes, and without a word uttered, McAlpine’s film reminds us that, like those who came before us, our existence is fleeting and ultimately worn away, and in the same breath exists the impossibility of discovering the secrets of our universe,” wrote POV’s Rachel Ho on the film. “However, for all the morbidity, there’s genuine joy and beauty to be found in the contradictions of the past and the present, the modern and the bygone — a perfectly struck imbalance that can feel rather strange.”
