'Moonfish' Animated Indie Debuts Trailer ahead of Venice Premiere - Animation Magazine

The official trailer has arrived for Moonfish — an American animated indie exploring the existential impact of grief one a lone space-farer, featuring the voices of Morgan Spector (The Gilded Age) and Lucy Liu (Kill Bill). The monochrome, 2D piece is slated to premiere at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival (September 2-12) and is tagged as the only animated feature in this year’s program.

Synopsis: A grieving astronaut who loses his only companion on a deep-space mining mission must fulfil a strict corporate quota to return home. As his year of solitude passes, his grip on reality unravels the line between the living and non-living.

Writer-director Daniel Zvereff explains in his filmmaker’s statement for La Biennale that the film was inspired by a traumatic experience in his own life, when he was misdiagnosed with a heart condition by a Medicaid doctor and “casually told” he could die soon.

“[D]uring those 14 days sitting in my apartment believing my life was ending, time’s flow was disrupted. My consciousness tried to absorb every remaining second like a sponge in an ocean, simultaneously living in the past and a stolen future. Experiencing that liminal space where time, mortality and hyper-awareness collide permanently altered how I view existence,” he writes.

“Moonfish is the translation of that waiting room. I set the story on an isolated asteroid as an allegory for our modern condition: stranded in our own solitude, crushed by corporate techno-oligarchies and living through screen-mediated lives. Our protagonist, a working-class contractor processing the loss of a partner and a shared dream, must navigate his declining health while completely cut off from humanity.”

Moonfish marks the feature film debut for Brooklyn-based animator Zvereff, who’s most recent short Drago was selected for Sundance 2024. The film was developed and produced as part of the Venice festival’s Biennale College Cinema advanced training laboratory, and with a grant from La Biennale di Venezia — the first animated film to receive such an award.

The film is produced by Lucky Accident Productions (Mireia Vilanova), Present Company (Rebecca Wyzan) and Cartuna (James Belfer). Spector and Liu are executive producers. Sami Jano (Pets, Blue Sun Palace), who collaborated with Zvereff on Drago, composed the music.

New Europe Film Sales is representing Moonfish for distribution.