by Hudson Moura
Perfectly a Strangeness (Alison McAlpine) and The girl who cried pearls (Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski) arrive to the 2026 Oscar conversation not by converging on a shared aesthetic program, but by staging two different propositions about cinema’s relation to knowledge. One looks outward—toward an instrumented sky and the ruins of scientific aspiration—through the patient drift of animals across a desert landscape. The other looks inward—toward moral narration, biblical echo, and the fragile economy of desire—through a handcrafted animated fable. Taken together, these shorts suggest a productive polarity in contemporary Canadian screen culture: the documentary that becomes essay, and the fable that becomes ethics.
Perfectly a Strangeness: Documentary as Essay, Observation as Disorientation
Alison McAlpine’s Perfectly a Strangeness is, on its surface, disarmingly simple: three donkeys wander through a desert terrain and explore an abandoned observatory. Yet the film’s central achievement lies precisely in its refusal to treat that premise as merely illustrative. Rather than presenting the animals as “subjects” to be explained, the film lets their movement generate the film’s epistemology: a cinema of hesitant approach, partial access, and sustained not-knowing.
The camera’s relationship to the donkeys is key. At times, the film seems to adopt something close to an animal point of view; at others, it places the donkeys squarely in the centre of the frame, inviting an unusual reciprocity as they look directly into the lens. That direct address—an animal “breaking the fourth wall”—does not function as a gimmick so much as a conceptual hinge. The gaze returned to the camera unsettles the hierarchy typically implied by documentary looking: the viewer is not only granted access to the animals’ world, but also made visible to it. In other moments, the camera’s height and sway suggest the embodied perspective of riding—an implied human presence that remains off-screen, never stabilised into a character. This oscillation among vantage points produces a productive ambiguity: who, exactly, is observing whom, and under what authority?
The observatory itself becomes less a location than a figure: a monumental remnant of machinic vision embedded within a local geography that exceeds it. The “strangeness” that the film names is not only the contrast between industrial-scale scientific infrastructure and an apparently indifferent desert, but also the encounter between that infrastructure and animals for whom the site is neither emblem nor evidence—only texture, shelter, obstacle, playground. The ruins do not offer narrative closure; they open a gap. In this sense, the film’s observational patience becomes philosophical. It asks the viewer to consider the distance between scientific desire (to know the universe through apparatus) and animal presence (to inhabit space without interpretive compulsion).
That outward movement is extended by the film’s contemplative turn toward the sky. The gesture is not didactic; it does not translate astronomy into information. Instead, it frames the sky as an allusive horizon—a cinema of cosmos rather than a documentary of science. Here, McAlpine’s work aligns more closely with the tradition of essay film than with conventional documentary: it uses documentary materials (landscape, nonhuman bodies, real sites) to produce thought rather than proof.
This is reinforced by the film’s notable scarcity of contextualising information. Aside from end-credit references to Chilean sites—La Silla Observatory and Paranal Observatory—there is little to anchor the viewer in the usual coordinates of documentary evidence: no orienting captions, no explanatory voice, no stabilising “aboutness.” For some viewers, this may frustrate expectations, particularly given the film’s nomination as a documentary short. Yet the absence can be understood as a deliberate poetics: by withholding the explanatory frame, the film becomes more abstract and, paradoxically, more universal—not because it erases specificity, but because it forces spectators to confront how quickly “documentary” is equated with informational mastery. McAlpine instead offers a documentary that insists on opacity as an ethical stance: the world does not owe us immediate legibility.
Available on Crave streaming.
Rating: 4/5
The girl who cried pearls: The Animated Fable as Moral Economy
Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski’s The girl who cried pearls operates through an almost opposite set of strategies. Where Perfectly a Strangeness derives meaning from the friction between image and explanation, The girl… foregrounds narration as the engine of sense. The film is structured as a fable, relayed largely by an elderly storyteller whose voice shapes the viewer’s access to the tale and to its ethical stakes.
The premise—“the girl who cried pearls”—immediately situates the film within a lineage of moral storytelling, where the marvellous is not an escape from reality but a device for intensifying it. The pearls themselves function as condensed symbols: beauty and value literalised, emotion materialised, and vulnerability converted into currency. In this way, the film invites a reading in terms of political economy at the scale of the intimate: what happens when affect is commodified, when the body’s expressions become extractable resources?
The notes’ reference to biblical resonance—particularly an allusion to Eve crying pearls—adds a further interpretive layer. Whether taken as direct intertext or atmospheric echo, the biblical frame would place the film in dialogue with narratives of origin, temptation, loss, and the gendered distribution of blame. Within the fable mode, such allusions do not require literal confirmation to operate; they work as cultural memory, a shared symbolic register that can deepen the story’s critique of greed and foolishness. The film’s moral argument, then, is not simply that characters make poor choices, but that desire is structurally vulnerable to exploitation—especially when beauty (pearls) becomes the measure of worth.
Visually, the film’s animation is central to its persuasive power. Fables depend on the credibility of their invented worlds; animation supplies that credibility not through verisimilitude, but through coherence of texture, rhythm, and tone. The result is a sensory ethics: the film does not merely tell a moral; it stages it in the viewer’s perceptual experience. In this respect, the short participates in a longstanding Canadian tradition of animation that privileges craft and atmosphere as modes of thinking—an aesthetic where the image does not decorate the narrative but constitutes its argument.
Rating: 3.5/5
In Dialogue: Two Routes Beyond the Evidentiary
What unites these films is not theme but method: both refuse the reductive idea that cinema’s value lies in confirming what we already know. McAlpine’s film dismantles documentary certainty by making explanation optional and gaze reciprocal; Lavis and Szczerbowski’s film uses fable to treat moral and social truth as something that can be approached only obliquely, through allegory and symbol.
Their Oscar nominations in short documentary and short animation categories thus read not as simple genre validations, but as reminders that the “short” form often functions as a laboratory for cinema’s epistemologies. Perfectly a Strangenessproposes that documentary can be a practice of humility—an art of staying with the world rather than mastering it. The girl who cried pearls proposes that animation can be a mode of ethical critique—an art of making value visible by making it strange.
If one film finds the universe by looking at abandoned instruments beneath an immense sky, the other finds a universe within a tear—small, luminous, coveted, and perilous. In both cases, the image becomes a philosophical proposition: cinema as a way of thinking with what resists our desire to own it.
Watch the entire film The girl who cried pearls (17min) here: