This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
Something that has always fascinated me about animation cinema is the freedom it offers us to create something from scratch. Surrealistic and bizarre scenarios and realities that can be used as a metaphorical tool to talk about something that is common to us in our more “real” reality.
Like my two other films, Ice Merchants was born out of an image/scenario that came to my mind and stuck with me. Most of those images “appear” while I’m dreaming or about to fall asleep, although sometimes they also come to mind during the day. Then, I spend a good amount of time “day dreaming” and exploring that reality through drawings and writing, until I feel like I found something that resonates with me. This is my only way of doing location scouting, since my film’s locations don’t actually exist in real life. And that’s when the ideas for the actual film’s narrative start to occur, that naturally end up covering topics that are personal and dear to me.
My first two films were more focused on psychological conditions that I relate to, projecting myself on the narrative’s protagonists. ICE MERCHANTS covers a more humane story (in my view) about family connection, simple daily rituals and routines, studying them metaphorically as a foundation of human relationships in the long run. All three of my films end up covering loneliness and solitude, as well as some sort of conflict between the protagonists and the realities they exist in, which I guess makes sense because I end up treating those realities as active characters since the beginning of the film’s production.
Aesthetically, I always tend to incorporate my interest in strong shadows, extreme camera angles, and limited colour palettes in my films. There’s also an “on-going” treatment of the film’s sound- track and sound-design, that I started working on since the beginning of the film’s production, alongside the animation (sometimes even before).
ICE MERCHANTS is a family drama set in an impossible reality, brought to life with the collaboration of the most amazingly talented and hardworking team of artists that I could have asked for. I couldn’t have been luckier.