Gravity: New short film shows the other end of Sandra Bullock’s distress call

Remember in Gravity, when Sandra Bullock was trapped inside that Russian space pod, cut off from her communications center with no one to talk to, and when she called for help the only person she could get was a dude on the other side of the Earth who didn’t speak English? Now she knows what it’s like to be a Comcast customer. Also, WB and Jonas Cuarón made a seven-minute film showing the other end of the call, and they’re promoting it as a short film in its own right.

What unfolds on the other end of that fractured conversation, complete with a barking dog and a crying baby, is the subject of a short film by Jonas Cuaron, son of director Alfonso Cuaron, who co-wrote the screenplay for Warner Bros.’ $500 million-grossing awards contender with his father. That seven-minute companion piece, titled Aningaaq, was financed by Warner Home Video, which initially envisioned it as a unique extra feature for Gravity‘s Blu-ray edition. But the stark, contemplative Aningaaq has developed a life of its own via festival screenings at Venice and Telluride. Now Warners has submitted it for Oscar consideration in the live-action short category; should it snag a nomination alongside its sure-bet blockbuster companion, they are poised to make Academy Awards history as the first feature and spinoff short drawn from the same material to be nominated together in the same year. [THR]

Pretty cool, but I prefer the version where Sandra Bullock calls the Eskimo and he’s like, “WAAAAAAAZZZZUUUUPPP,” and then Sandra Bullock’s all “WAAAAAAHHHHHHZAAAAAAAAHHH,” and then the guy’s wife is all “WAAAAAAASAAAAAABIII,” and they all crush Bud Lights together and pour it out on the snow in honor of his dying sled dog.

The idea for Aningaaq, which follows an Inuit fisherman stationed on a remote fjord in Greenland, occurred to the Cuarons as they were working out the beats for the Gravity screenplay. “It’s this moment where the audience and the character get this hope that Ryan is finally going to be OK,” Jonas, 31, tells THR. “Then you realize that everything gets lost in translation.” Both Cuarons spent time in the glacial region (Alfonso once toyed with setting a movie there) and fell in love with the barren vastness of its frozen wilderness. During one of those visits, Alfonso met a drunken native who would become the basis for the title character, played by Greenland’s Orto Ignatiussen. But it wasn’t until Jonas, on a two-week trek gathering elements for his film, was inspired by the local inhabitants’ profound attachment to their sled dogs that he decided to incorporate that element into the plot.

[via The Hollywood Reporter]

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