Sep 18, 2023

2024 Academy Award Nominee for Best Short Film: "A Kind of Testament" directed by Steven Vuillemin

Welcome to Cartoon Brew's spotlight series highlighting animated short films that have qualified for the 2024 Academy Awards. There are several ways for a film to qualify for an award. In this edition, we will focus on films that have won Academy Award-eligible prizes at festivals that are eligible for the Academy Awards.

Today's short film is Steven Vuijmin's A Kind of Testament. The film won the Go Short Award at the Go Short International Short Film Festival in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and earned Oscar eligibility. The film also won the Zlatko Grgic Award for the first professional film at the Zagreb International Short Film Festival and was in competition at the Berlin International Short Film Festival.

In this haunting short, a young woman finds an animated video on the Internet made from her own private selfies. After investigating, she contacts a stranger with the same name who confesses to stealing her identity, but a big unanswered question looms. Disturbing music and sound effects clash with the brilliant illustrations to create a viewing experience that forces the audience to share the protagonist's anxiety.

Cartoon Brew: You say that the dubbing the audience hears and the animation they see were intended to tell two different versions of the same story. Where did that idea come from and how did it influence the script? He said, "Here's the context in which this footage was created." But in my films, there is as much drama in what the narration tells as in the animation itself. The voice of a woman stalked online draws you into the protagonist of the strange and grotesque illustration you are seeing. It was about embedding several levels of fiction together (because none of it is true and all the characters are fictional). It works like an endless sandwich of documentary and fiction, based on reality (her Facebook photos), made into fiction (the weird animations), and supposedly presented as documentary (voice-over), when in fact it's all fiction From. The animated pictures you are seeing do exist and were created over a period of years.

If you haven't actually seen the film, it may not make much sense.

What was it about the story and concept that resonated with you and made you want to direct this film? It has a lot to do with how the film was made. This film is my first film and I started making it when I was 30 years old. Up until that point, I was playing EuroMillions every week, hoping that if I won the jackpot, I could make a film; at 30, I questioned my life decisions and realized that I could make it on my own, even without the EuroMillions jackpot. At the time, I had been working as a designer/animator/illustrator for nearly a decade, and I had the necessary skill set. All I needed was time. So I stopped most of my socializing. I turned down as many jobs as I could and spent my time making films instead. four and a half years later, I joined a young company, Remembers, and had the pleasure of completing films with them.

What did you learn about the production side, the filmmaking side, the creative side, or the subject matter through the experience of making this film? I was able to make the film the way I wanted to without the constraints of time or money (at least for the first five years). Thanks to the extended time frame, I had the chance to read Proust's entire oeuvre, some of which I was able to read as an audiobook while painting. I had the opportunity to work with people I had wanted to work with for a long time (Kerao Ying for costumes, Kuo So and Jack Willie for music, and Krumpf for sound design), and in the process met many new people with great talent (the producers of Remember and animation staff, and voice actors Angela Clarkin and Naomi Yang).

As an animator, illustrator, and comic artist, I had been developing this style for years. With this film, I wanted to take it further in terms of richness and detail. I wanted the audience to feel that a lot of time went into drawing it all. The film is designed as a contemporary "vanitas" (the same genre of painting). It is a showcase of the artist's skill, but also a reminder that beauty and art are no big deal in the face of time and, eventually, death.