Oscar 2023: He spent 16 years recording his daughter and will now compete for a statuette

the American director Jay Rosenblatt will compete for the 2023 Oscars in the Best Documentary Short Film category for one of his ideas that has found its best means of expression in cinema.

For 16 years, once a year, the director recorded his daughter She answering the same questions.

The touching result of this “collage” (this is how Jay interprets his films) called How do you measure a year? (How do you measure a year?) brought it back to the Hollywood Academy Awards, which had already had him in their ranks for his other short documentary When we were bullied.

the short

Rosenblatt began recording Ella when she was two years old. She did this with a homemade camera that she had on hand. The staging was always similar. The young woman appears in front of the lens, wearing a simple microphone and standing in front of a simple wall.

Every year Jay gave him the same questionnaire. “How old are you?”, “What are dreams?”, etc. Although the questions were repeated, the same was not the case with the answers, which changed in tone and meaning as Ella grew older.

“I wanted to be real. I wanted people to feel that this was our particular relationship, but to be able to identify with their own relationships between their children or their parents,” Rosenblatt explained in an interview.

As the years went by, the girl’s responses went from funny to sad to sad to loving to loving to funny. And so. The variations, which depended on the stage of childhood and adolescence of the now young adult protagonist, are the meaning of the short film.

“It was very interesting for me to see the difference in years. How his emotions have changed about him, how he expressed himself differently year after year or it was difficult for him to communicate or when he didn’t want to, ”commented Rosenblatt in an interview for the YouTube channel Filmaker Fest.

The film develops linearly and ends with Ella alone in front of the camera. In the end, the young woman doesn’t answer her questions, but rather tells her father how she feels about him.

Before becoming a director, Rosenblatt was a therapist and earned a master’s degree in counseling.

When he took a film elective while studying, Jay decided to devote himself fully to art. “I took a film class there and fell in love with the process. I think I spent more time on these little projects than all the work in my consulting classes,” he told Filmaker Fest.

At the 2023 Oscars, how do you measure a year? will compete against Indian short our baby elephantthe Russian pull outand the Americans The Martha Mitchell effect AND Stranger at the gate.