Plot

Every day, a father and his son jump with a parachute from their vertiginous cold house, attached to a cliff, to go to the village on the ground, far away where they sell the ice they produce daily.

The story of the Ice Merchants begins in a little house tethered to the side of a cliff. A boy is on a swing that swings out over the edge of the house and we see from this view they are at a great height. A man is checking a box of water and sees that it has frozen. He starts chipping away at the block and soon the boy joins him making smaller chips of ice. He puts the chips in an ice chest, straps it to him, gathers up the boy in his arms and free-falls off the porch. On their descent through the clouds they calmly look at each other, even as their hats fly off their heads. When the ground comes into view the man pulls open a gliding apparatus and he steers toward a small village. They return to their little house via a rope and pulley system, fill the box with water, and the boy swings again. At this point we put together that he's selling ice to the villagers below, and this explains why they are living in a house on the side of a cliff. The next day they do it all again, this time the man brings out two new hats for their journey (which is conveyed through tags hanging from the hats) and again the hats are lost on the free-fall. They sell the ice to the villagers, buy new hats (each of the same color as before), and return home. The impression is that the routine has become monotonous despite its seemingly thrilling nature from the perspective of the viewer. The routine breaks when the boy reaches for a yellow mug and the man gently puts it back. We later see the man at a small table where he's placed the yellow mug in front of an empty chair across the table from him as he sits slumped in his chair. It becomes apparent by the emptiness of the chair that the yellow mug was the mother's mug who is no longer with them. We see that the season has changed, the sun is shining brighter, the snow is melting, and when they check the box they discover that the water has not frozen. Just then an avalanche of snow falls on their house and begins to threaten the integrity of the tethered system holding their house to the cliff. The house shifts and things start sliding. The boy sees the glider sliding off the porch, and he tries to grab it whereupon he almost falls off also, but his father catches him just in time. Realizing now there is no way to get down, they hold on to each other acknowledging that they must leave, but that they will do it together. At this moment we see that they recognize the importance of their bond, which had only been underlying before. The boy snuggles into his father's arms and they free-fall once more for what would be their last time. On the ground we see a yellow hat, then more hats scattered around, then a whole pile of hats. We then see that they landed in the pile of hats and that it has softened their fall. They blink in surprise as they realize that they are both okay. As the scene zooms out, we see the stratified layer of hats from years of jumps. The bottom third of the pile is a layer of the father's hats mixed with yellow hats, the middle layer has 3 colors, and the top layer contains only the two colors of the father and his son. The pile of hats represents all of the years spent together, first as a couple, then as a family, and then with the loss of the yellow hats which we've come to know as the mother's color. The hats are a visual representation of the history of their lives, and a story of how their past cushions them and saves them.