Nov 19, 2024

Academy Awards 2025 Short Film Nominees: -Miracle-Director Nienke Deutz

Cartoon Brew is putting the spotlight on an animated short film nominated for an Academy Award in 2025.

Today's film is a miracle of the Dutch filmmaker Nienke Deutz and was produced by Lunanime, Les Productions de Milou and Kepler Films. The short has qualified multiple times for the Academy Award's Animated Short category, including winning the Grand Prix at Animafest Zagreb and winning Gold Hugo for best animated short at the Chicago International Film Festival.

Using a transparent cut-out character in a stop-motion setting, Deutz is a miracle hotel, a place where the sun is always out, where food is abundant and relaxing, but how can our hero find her place in such a fun place when she is faced with something she has always longed for and does not have?

Comic Brewing: What research was done to prepare this film-What resources were used to influence how we approached sensitive subjects like pregnancy envy and uncertainty?-

Nienke Deutz: What I wanted to tell you in this story was the will to open up space for yourself when everyone around you is not in the family structure mindset at the age of having a baby. The specific experience of Irma is not explained, and some may read it as a postpartum situation, but it's not the specific situation I've tried to portray. To create this story, I talked to different people about their experience of not having children and read a lot about the subject. I also read a lot about depictions of pregnancy in pop culture and what this does to our perception and imagination.

What was it that forced me to connect with you and direct a film about this story or concept-

When I started working on this film, I was in my mid-thirties and the question of whether I should have children was very noticeable to most people at some point. Even if you clean this answer for yourself, there are people around you who also deal with this, so somehow you have to be relevant. It can be hard to tell what your own doubts are, what is placed on you by your surroundings, and where 2 can overlap, because everyone has their own journey and their own pain. I think the problem that's hard to talk about can make a great subject for a movie because we can bring to the fore what we shy away from in the conversation, which actually opens up some beautiful conversations with a lot of people after they've seen the movie. People who have no children or are struggling with pregnancy, or who are very happy to have nothing. But I also spoke to people who have children, and they were open about their struggles and doubts in this situation. It was really beautiful because it filled the gap that sometimes seems to exist between parents and non-parents.

What did you learn through the experience of making this film, production-wise, filmmaking-wise, creative, or about the subject-

I can make an infinite list to answer this question. (Laughter) Making this film was a steep learning curve in almost every respect. But now that the movie is pretty much over, the thing that sticks to me the most, and what I'll take with me in the future, is how I want to work. Trusting that you know your own pace and aiming to create working conditions that matter to you will be the key to future projects.

You can explain how you developed your visual approach to cinema- why you settled on this style/technique-

The style of cinema is derived from my debut film Bloeistraat11, which I also used to create transparent films with stop-motion sets. This is the best app I've ever used. I did not immediately set out to make a movie again with this technology. But I read this paper and talked about how the use of ultrasound and other visualization techniques changed the perception of pregnancy. We now "know" what every fetus looks like, but in fact this is a perfectly constructed image that no one has ever seen with naked eyes. A visual symmetry can be seen between the use of ultrasound, which makes the body of a pregnant person transparent, and the use of cut-out characters, which, depending on the lighting, can be firmly transparent, which is why this technique has been reused.