Short Film · 2020
Heat is one of the hardest things to animate. Cold can be suggested with blue light and tightened postures. Rain carries its own choreography. But heat real, pressing, atmospheric heat demands something subtler. It asks the image to seem like it is working against itself, to communicate an environment that makes movement difficult and stillness almost unbearable. Golden Shore, completed in 2020 after an eighteen-month production, is among the most successful animated depictions of heat that Cheese Sama has produced. It is also, unexpectedly, one of the studio's most personal films.
The film centres on a single figure genderless, rendered in shades of amber and ochre that dissolve her almost entirely into the landscape she inhabits. She stands at the edge of water. Behind her, clouds sit like wool that has been pulled apart. The horizon line bisects the image with an evenness that feels almost geometric, and yet the image is alive the air above the water moves, the hair above the figure moves, and everything in the frame is performing the same slow negotiation with the heat pressing down from above.
The director came to the project during the early months of the pandemic, at a period when the studio, like almost every other production company, was operating under severe constraints. Travel was impossible. Collaboration was conducted over video calls. The physical process of animation the passing of paper between hands, the gathering around a screen to evaluate a sequence together was suspended. What was possible, in this reduced environment, was something more interior: films made from memory, from imagination, from the resources available in a single room.
Golden Shore was made almost entirely by one artist over fourteen months. The background paintings done in actual gouache on actual paper, scanned and composited digitally were completed in daily sessions of two to three hours, producing an almost meditative accumulation of mark-making that gives the film its particular texture. Nothing was rushed. Nothing could be rushed. The circumstances of the time, in a paradoxical way, gave the film exactly the conditions it needed.
The figure at the film's centre was described by the director, in a production note written years later, as "everyone I have watched wait for something." Not waiting in the active sense not anticipating, not hoping but in the particular state that has no good word for it, where you are simply still in the face of something enormous, and the stillness is not resignation but a form of presence. The figure does not leave the shore. We never see what she is looking at. The film ends the way it begins: with the water moving, the hair moving, the heat pressing down, the clouds doing very little.
The film was completed and submitted to festivals in a year when the entire short film circuit had moved online. It found its audience through screens rather than theatres, which the director later said might have been the right context for it a film about solitude, watched alone. It collected several festival prizes and was subsequently acquired for broadcast by a European arts channel, where it aired late at night and attracted, over the course of several months, a devoted and quietly vocal following.
Director: Cheese Sama
Production: Cheese Sama, 2020