During an emotional moment of Gravity, Sandra Bullock‘s Dr. Ryan Stone sends out a desperate plea for help over the radio on the Russian space capsule she’s trapped in. Her desperate conversation with the man’s voice on the end is one of the more devastating moments of the fantastic film. In the short film Aningaaq, Jonás Cuarón answers the question of who the man on the other end of the fractured conversation is and what his life is like.
In Aningaaq, we meet Aningaaq, an Innuit fisherman working on a remote fjord in Greenland. In the seven-minute short we meet Aningaaq, as well as the dogs and the baby that comfort Stone as she prepares to suffocate alone in space.
The film was shot on location with a budget of about $100,000 and was initially conceived as an extra on the Blu-ray edition of Gravity. However, it was wildly popular after screening at both the Venice and Toronto film festivals, and now Warner Home Video, which financed the short, has submit Aningaaq for Oscar consideration. If it wins, it would make history as the first spinoff nominated for an Academy Award in the same year as the feature which inspired it.
Bullock, herself an Academy voter after winning Best Actress for The Blind Side, has said she would vote for Aningaaq, were it to be nominated. At a press conference, Bullock called the short an “absolutely beautiful piece of loneliness. … I get goose bumps thinking about it.”
Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for Gravity‘s Blu-ray release to watch Aningaaq. You can watch it here, in full, thanks to The Hollywood Reporter.
