Moonfish

Bluesky

The Biennale College Cinema programme at Venice Film Festival represents an opportunity and a challenge for first or second-time filmmakers. It’s a chance to receive a 200,000 euro grant (£171k) for their micro-budget feature, along with mentorship, but the challenge comes from the timescale. Each project must be brought to completion within a year. That’s perhaps why this is the first year that an animated feature has made the cut since the programme started in 2012 and it’s definitely why American writer/director/animator Daniel Zvereff deserves additional plaudits for getting Moonfish over the finish line, not least because he did it in nine months.

Simplicity is the name of the game, and he makes a virtue of it to tell his sci-fi tale of loneliness in space. Cassius (Morgan Spector) and Vesper (Lucy Liu) live in a nearish future where descendants of those who previously lived on Earth are born into mining colonies. The pair of them are heading out to an asteroid where mining enough of the substance they’re looking for means the prospect of a return to Earth. But, as signs almost everywhere remind them, “No quota, no pick-up”.

When disaster strikes early on, Cassius finds himself trying to achieve the quota himself, with only Vesper’s goldfish for company, and soon his grip on reality starts to slip as the fish becomes a conversationalist. People losing it in space has proved fertile ground for movies including Moon and Spaceman but Zvereff adopts a distinctive melancholy mood. The animation is stark monochrome and the boxy aspect ratio adds to the sense of being closed in. The smallness of Cassius’ capsule helps to keep things simple from an animation point of view but also allows details to become significant, whether it’s the loose screw that rattles from a ceiling panel or the sad face light that blinks if the daily quota isn’t hit.

The sense of drudgery is matched by danger – daily injections are needed to keep the radiation level at bay for Cassius while the fish’s water filter also needs changing regularly. Attentive sound design also helps raise the stakes.The job and quota mean the clock is ticking and the idea that “humans are cheaper” than sending robots to asteroids feels in tune with current fears surrounding the rise of artificial intelligence. This is an existential crisis film for the zero-hours contract, gig economy era and while Zvereff’s film is not without hope, it also shows how hard that can be to hold onto.

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