The heartbreaking autobiographical tale of how director Ari Gold’s Mother was killed in a helicopter crash with legendary concert promoter Bill Graham, this 22-minute short won a Student Academy Award back in 2000. A tale of raw emotion and surprising warmth (considering the subject) Helicopter employs animation, live-action reenactments, scale-model reconstructions, photographs and answering-machine messages (performed by Ari’s sister Nina) to tell this deeply personal tale.

Described by Gold as a ‘recreation of the emotional aftermath of sudden loss’, Helicopter may focus on how the director and his family dealt with the immeasurable loss in the wake of the crash, but this is a film easy to connect with, and relate to, thanks to its all-embracing themes of family and grief. “I know other people who have dealt with loss and the movie speaks to that experience of trying to reconcile the impossibility of somebody you love not existing and coping with the reality that they don’t exist anymore”, explains Gold in an interview on myfirstshoot.com. “The movie wraps all the specifics into it – a big rock music death, a big news death, and all the other specifics I had to deal with when I was trying to remember who my mother was”.

With his sister performing the voice of his mother, his brother (Ethan) composing music for the score and friends of the director playing the siblings on screen, Helicopter ends up not only feeling like a personal story, but a very personal production. The somewhat unpolished result of these elements coming together does nothing to lessen the reverberating nature of Gold’s story, if anything it adds a certain rawness which gives the film the emotive power to really make a lasting impression on its audience.

Screened at Sundance, SXSW, and numerous other festivals back in the early naughties, Helicopter is a short that hasn’t lost any of impact in the 16-years since it was created. Following the success of his student film, Gold went to on to direct 2008 feature-length comedy Adventures of Power (which he also starred in), he continues to make short films and has even been spotted playing a conspiracy theorist in Mike Cahill’s Another Earth.