It was a night of firsts at the Oscars, at least in the animated shorts category.
Gabriel Osorio’s CG film Bear Story won the award for best animated short. The film claims a number of firsts, including the first-ever win for a Chilean film at the Academy Awards, as well as the first time a film from Latin America has won the animated short category.
Bear Story’s tale of a bear separated from his wife and son is a political allegory about the way that families were torn apart under Chile’s notorious dictator Augusto Pinochet. Osorio acknowledged the film’s subtext during his acceptance speech when he dedicated the film to his grandfather and “all the people like him who had suffered in exile. We really hope that this must never happen again.”
