Dec 10, 2024

2025 Academy Award® Short Contender: “Remember Us,” directed by Pablo León

Cartoon Brew spotlights an animated short film that has been nominated for the 2025 Academy Awards. [In this issue, we present “Remember Us,” directed by Pablo León. The short won the Animayo for best Spanish-language animated short and qualified for the Academy Award.

Through this uncompromising 2D short, a journalist documents the experiences of survivors of the tragic 12-year-long Salvadoran civil war in the 1980s, exploring themes of childhood loss, violence against women, and indigenous peoples to restore hope for a future spanning three generations. The film is produced by Kojtanchanej, 100 Volcanoes, Antigravity Academy, Ocelotl, StreetsAhead, and Dinamita Animación.

Cartoon Brew: How has the film been received by the local community and have you received feedback from people who have experienced this conflict by bringing a part of Salvador's history, a history that is rarely told, to the screen? Pablo León: There are people who have seen the film and learned about the conflict for the first time. Others say it has inspired them to talk to their families about their family history and the war for the first time. The film has sparked a curiosity in a new generation of Salvadoran Americans to talk about the war with their parents and grandparents who lived through this period.

What is also interesting is that the story and film connected with people outside of El Salvador, especially those in other Latin American countries that share the experience of war and violence. I received messages from people who saw the short films that the themes hit close to home as they recalled the violence during the dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and the civil war and armed conflict in Colombia. In my mind, I feel strongly that talking about the past can restore people's dignity and all that we have lost, and this reception reinforced that feeling, and I am honored that our film can be used as a conversation starter.

What was it about this story or concept that captured your heart and inspired you to direct this film? At the time, I became friends with Jonathan Rivas from El Salvador, with whom I bonded over this and eventually became executive producer.

El Salvador is a small country that has experienced massive atrocities, so we wanted to find a way to talk about the scars left by the conflict and find room for hope. It was important to track memories about these frustrating periods of history through the lens of a journalist (perhaps one of the most bleak, but also one of the most important, jobs in Latin America). And that is our goal, to share these intimate experiences and talk about historical memory. We are a region in constant turmoil, and it will be important to remember these things so that we do not repeat them again. Unfortunately, this is the case in Latin America.

What did you learn about the production aspect, the filmmaking aspect, the creative aspect, or the subject matter through the experience of making this film? I wanted to approach this film in a non-traditional, documentary style, in terms of depicting specific moments of people rather than full-blown violence on screen, and to let the audience hear the stories of people reconstructing their memories.

We worked with our co-production partners at Dinamita Animacion in Colombia to maintain this balance without spilling over into graphic depictions of violence. On the technical side, there were many characters on screen, but we were able to find creative ways to keep the animators from overstepping their limits without sacrificing vision.

How did you develop your visual approach to this film and why did you settle on this style/method? We then prepared a simpler, more mosaic-like plane that occurs when the characters are under extreme stress. This was based on the work of Salvadoran artist Fernando Rullorto, who created several murals depicting armed conflict. Ultimately, we wanted to have an accessible aesthetic that would allow anyone to pick up the film and learn a bit of history, regardless of how they feel about animation.