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Alfonso Cuarón Presented the FLOW + AN ALMOST CHRISTMAS STORY Program at 22nd FICM

Ariadna Lucas Coronel

The program, consisting of the feature film Flow (dir. Gints Zilbalodis, 2024) and the short film An Almost Christmas Story (dir. David Lowery, 2024), produced by Alfonso Cuarón, was presented with the Mexican director in attendance at the 22nd Morelia International Film Festival (FICM).

The founder and general director of the festival, Daniela Michel, said a few words before the screening, highlighting its special nature: “We are going to present An Almost Christmas Story, produced by Alfonso Cuarón, and after this short film, we will present Flow, a wonderful fiction feature film that was at the Cannes Film Festival.”

She also emphasized the focus on animation at FICM, reminding the audience that: “it is very important for us to show animation at the festival.”

Before an expectant audience, Alfonso Cuarón spoke about the series of animation projects to which Almost Christmas Story belongs: "It's part of a project of short films around the end of the year parties, at first. The project was actually to revolve around parties, not necessarily just about Christmas, and it just happened that they were all about Christmas. The first one we did was with Alicia Rohrwacher, Le pupille and now it's a film by David Lowery, a great director. I don't know if you are familiar with him; A Ghost Story (2017) is a great movie and then he made The Legend of the Green Knight (2021)." Cuarón said, adding that Lowery is one of the contemporary directors he admires most.

An interesting fact about the short film is that it is based on a real event that occurred in 2020: “This was a story that I discovered was a real story; an owl that got lost in a tree, they removed a tree, cut it down and it ended up in the huge tree that they put up at Rockefeller Center in New York, and from that, with Jack Thorne, who is a super writer, we created a story that David Lowery later reworked.”

The decision to make an animated short film was driven by David Lowery as he experimented with a digital technique to assimilate stop motion by also taking up handcrafted elements and mixing them with digital artifice.

The Mexican producer and filmmaker announced that the short film will premiere on Disney+ on November 11. He also expressed his excitement for the screening of Flow, a film he has been waiting to see since it premiered in festivals."