While shooting her documentary Second Sight on the Scottish isle of Skye, at the same time teaching poetry in Orkney, Canadian filmmaker Alison McAlpine had been told stories about the ancient standing stones and how they came to life at midnight and then danced until dawn. Many months later, when McAlpine was visiting La Silla Observatory in Chile to make her film Cielo, she thought about the myth of the dancing stones.
This helped inspire McAlpine’s short Perfectly A Strangeness, a poetic 15-minute documentary which follows three curious donkeys wandering around an abandoned observatory high in the desert.
Perfectly A Strangeness has shown at over 80 festivals, picking up many prizes in the process – an astonishing run that started in Cannes in 2024, encompassing events such as TIFF, IDFA and West Lake in China, and now culminating in an Oscar nomination.
“When I am making a film, certainly for this film, which is without any text or dialogue, I always go back to my first experiences,” McAlpine tells Business Doc Europe. “When I arrived at La Silla for the first time, it was during the afternoon and the observatory felt abandoned because people were sleeping…there was nobody about because everybody works at night.”
Many of the observatory domes are no longer in practical use anyway. “They are closed up and the concrete around them is all cracked and so it has this abandoned feeling about it,” McAlpine continues. “There’s a beauty to that abandonment…”
The domes still emit eerie, uncanny sounds – clinks and puffs. “These huge metallic giants, even when they were closed, they felt to me like they were living because of the sounds.” As she spent time there, she couldn’t help but be reminded of those stones in Orkney. “The challenge for me was how to do something that felt very different to me as a filmmaker and that really challenged me in new ways,” she reflects. She wanted to make a film that used only the “fundamental elements of cinema – light, shadow, sound, movement, reflection etc.”
Why donkeys? She had seen the animals grazing close by the domes while making Cielo. “That juxtaposition was fascinating to me…”
In Perfectly A Strangeness, she deliberately sets out to show the observatory from the donkeys’ (not the human) point of view. Rather than come up with a conventional script, she wrote a treatment that was more like a piece of music, “in four movements.”
These weren’t wild donkeys, but Palomo, Ruperto and Palaye still had their foibles – and, yes, they could be stubborn. “It was sometimes a challenge because they would escape, but they were so affectionate,” the director says of her protagonists. They would nuzzle up and put their faces on the filmmakers’ chests. They loved to have their ears stroked.
Cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni had an ingenious way of filming from behind the donkeys’ heads, giving us the illusion we are looking at the observatory from their perspective. “The whole idea was that we would be with the donkeys [capturing] anything that spontaneously happened, and he was just right there in terms of those shots with the ears…he is very agile!”
There are also lots of close-ups of the donkeys’ eyes which seem to capture their wisdom and their sensitivity. “They were just gentle beings who put up with us.”
At times, the filmmakers used treats to entice the animals in the right direction. “They were very well fed. We realised we overfed them sometimes. We brought up to the observatory lots of hay for them but we were also told they loved food scraps…so the kitchen would save food scraps for us.”
When the donkeys ate too much, they wouldn’t want to go anywhere, would get lazy and would just “hang out.” The filmmakers tried to adapt their routine to that of the animals. The real difficulty came at night-time when the donkeys, if they felt like it, would suddenly wander off.
Some very well-known figures are championing the documentary, everyone from legendary sound editor Walter Murch (“really makes you wonder: what the hell is going on in this universe”) to award-winners like Ben Proudfoot, Laura Poitras, Maite Alberdi and fellow Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan.
Even so, McAlpine still sounds startled at being in contention for an Academy Award. “In truth, my film is really a hybrid. It’s certainly not a traditional studio-backed, issue-led documentary but we were qualified [for an Oscar run] and so we thought why not,” she says of the decision to enter the awards race, which was made on the hoof. After all, this was a tiny project produced through Second Sight Pictures, the director’s own company, without major backers.
“It feels like a David vs Goliath journey in truth because we have such an infinitesimally small promotional budget. I’m told Netflix and HBO etc have hundreds of thousand dollars even on a short film…and the Canadian government gives virtually nothing.”
The director and her team are waging a “grassroots” campaign. They haven’t had the means to invest in splashy ads or big promotional events. “The fact that my film has got this far is extraordinary,” she says. “It’s really the underdog out of the box.”
When McAlpine was in LA recently for the Oscar nominees’ lunch, she gathered together a small crew and found some more “Hollywood” donkeys which she filmed at the Griffith Observatory (famous as one of the locations in which we see James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause) and underneath the Hollywood sign itself. This was her “playful, joyful” answer to the extravagant conventional awards drive by the bigger companies – and her plea for indie films like her own to be given some attention too.
Perfectly A Strangeness now has North American distribution through the Criterion Channel, where it will be available from March onwards. It can also be watched on other platforms and broadcasters including Kanopy, Crave and France 3. Premium Films in Paris has been overseeing the distribution.
Inevitably, McAlpine has spent far more time supporting the film’s festival and awards journey than she did in actually making it. “At the beginning and the end, I would say, it has become a full-time job. It has been an enormous amount of work to keep all those invitations going…,” McAlpine sighs as she contemplates the huge amount of time she has spent on her travels with her donkeys. “I was very naive too produce this film myself. I plan never to do that again.”
Now, she admits, she will be “very excited” to get back to making films rather than talking about them – and there are no plans to expand Perfectly A Strangeness into a feature project. “One of the things I feel proud about, excited anyway, is that the film is no way a calling card…it’s a film that lives genuinely, naturally, at 15 minutes.”
