Luke Angus On the Cyclical Path of Love and Grief for BAFTA-Nominated Short ‘Solstice’

You can feel the cold winds blowing against the bountiful bright sun in Luke Angus’ BAFTA-nominated animated short film, Solstice. An Inuit man struggles to get through his daily routine as he wades through his duties–something is nagging at his emotions and that yellow ball in the sky makes its presence known hour after hour. Sometimes we feel like our greatest obstacle is time, and Angus’ film makes us feel the roundness of every emotion as we wait for day to give way to glorious night.

You cannot help but notice the circles all throughout Solstice’s narrative journey. That blaring sun never seems to let us forget that its there, but it’s also the large, fluffy hood that our hero sports to protect himself against the rush of cold in the Artic Circle. That circular shape is present everywhere: the top of an igloo, after all, is the shape of half of a circle and the makings of a snowman require spherical shapes. Obviously, a solstice has a circular patter, but Angus makes us feel the anticipation and the regrat that circle takes. There’s an inevitability to all of it.

Angus explains what it is like to create such texture and weight for Solstice‘s story. The wind blows around the fur on that large hood as well as the snow on the ground. In a flashback to our hero’s loss, rocks are tossed into the ice and we feel them spiraling through the air before landing with a weighted thud. These ideas might sound simple, but the filmmaker explains that this was one of the most difficult things to achieve in this film. When stargazing turns into something vast and huge, Angus describes the process of finding the right balance of scale and size to sustain that level of emotionality.

As the film comes to itsclimax, we ponder how our grief can go from something that feels very big and overwhelming to something very small. It lives with us–it’s all right if it never fully goes away. Solstice is not about learning to be alone but how sadness can transform your world into something joyful and robust with love.