TELLURIDE, Colo. – There’s an interesting bit of synergy happening in Telluride this year between the hottest ticket of the festival and a modest short film that has been screening before John Curran’s “Tracks.”
Without giving too much away (though some might consider this paragraph to contain SPOILERS — you’ve been warned), Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” features a scene in which astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) makes an S.O.S. radio call down to Earth and picks up the signal of an Inuk man in the arctic. Of course, you don’t really know he’s an Inuk until you get a look at Jonás Cuarón’s short film “Aningaaq,” which depicts the very same scene but from the Inuk man’s point of view with Stone’s voice coming in over the radio.
Of course, people seeing “Tracks” here who haven’t seen “Gravity” probably aren’t all that aware of what’s going on, but the short works on its own terms as a bit of a curiosity. It would have been nice to have it programmed along with the feature (Disney’s 3D short “Get a Horse!” is playing before “Gravity”), but having it pop up elsewhere in the fest lends a quirky bit of ubiquity to Alfonso Cuarón’s spectacle.
I imagine we’ll see the short pop up on the home video package for “Gravity,” but it would be neat if Warner Bros. could find a way to pair the two pieces up in cinemas. Maybe playing the short after the feature? I don’t know. But for festival-goers here in Telluride, the synergy is, well, kinda neat.
Oh, and a bit of trivia: In Greenlandic mythology, Aningaaq is the name of the moon.
“Gravity” arrives in theaters on Oct. 4.