“We humans are capable of greatness,” reads the first line in Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s The Hyperboreans as the narrator’s voice beams from an old TV set. On the screen, a hypno wheel spins and spins; the voice speaks of evolution and “the energetic charge of ancestral blood.” These ominous themes already suggest that the Chilean stop-motion animator / filmmaker duo continue to explore religious symbolism and the ritualistic nature of their Latin American heritage. Before premiering The Hyperboreans in this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight selection, their 2021 short The Bones was awarded the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film in Venice and proposed a fictionalized legacy to address colonial trauma. Now, their second feature (after 2018’s The Wolf House) continues to mix fact and fiction as a means to allegorize the past.
The scene cuts from a TV screen to a pristine, overhead wide shot of a film set.
The scene cuts from a TV screen to a pristine, overhead wide shot of a film set.
- 5/22/2024
- by Savina Petkova
- The Film Stage
Ari Aster and his producing partner Lars Knudsen have boarded Chile’s Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s new film “Hansel & Gretel” as executive producers through their company, Square Peg.
The Chilean duo’s feature “The Hyperboreans” forms part of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.
The story is expected to twist the fairy tale into inimitable shapes. “It’s our very personal adaptation of the classic fairy tale, with the main difference that Hansel and Gretel are both boys in this version, at least at the beginning of the story,” Cristóbal León told Variety. In this telling, “the story itself gets lost,” León added.
León and Cociña worked with Aster on “Beau is Afraid,” having come to his attention via their feature “The Wolf House,” a winner at Annecy described by Variety as “a jaw-dropping marriage of various animation techniques.”
“Cociña and León are among the true originals working in animation right now.
The Chilean duo’s feature “The Hyperboreans” forms part of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.
The story is expected to twist the fairy tale into inimitable shapes. “It’s our very personal adaptation of the classic fairy tale, with the main difference that Hansel and Gretel are both boys in this version, at least at the beginning of the story,” Cristóbal León told Variety. In this telling, “the story itself gets lost,” León added.
León and Cociña worked with Aster on “Beau is Afraid,” having come to his attention via their feature “The Wolf House,” a winner at Annecy described by Variety as “a jaw-dropping marriage of various animation techniques.”
“Cociña and León are among the true originals working in animation right now.
- 5/20/2024
- by Callum McLennan
- Variety Film + TV
From the Land of Ice and Snow: Cocina & Leon Pursue Hermetical Cinematic Spell
To say the latest feature from the experimentally inclined Chilean directing duo Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña is unclassifiable would be something of an understatement, delving as it does into a new frontier of juxtapositions, collapsing visual textures and narrative structures while somehow remaining coherent. Following their sinister 2018 animated feature The Wolf House (2018) and having contributed to the standout animated sequences of Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid (2023), the duo deliver something even more exceptionally offbeat with The Hyperboreans (Los hiperbóreos), a reference to inhabitants of ‘the extreme north,’ here routed back to the troubling Aryan mythos of self-classified supreme racial hierarchies fantasized by the Nazis.…...
To say the latest feature from the experimentally inclined Chilean directing duo Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña is unclassifiable would be something of an understatement, delving as it does into a new frontier of juxtapositions, collapsing visual textures and narrative structures while somehow remaining coherent. Following their sinister 2018 animated feature The Wolf House (2018) and having contributed to the standout animated sequences of Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid (2023), the duo deliver something even more exceptionally offbeat with The Hyperboreans (Los hiperbóreos), a reference to inhabitants of ‘the extreme north,’ here routed back to the troubling Aryan mythos of self-classified supreme racial hierarchies fantasized by the Nazis.…...
- 5/16/2024
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
“The Hyperboreans,” the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight entry from Chile, defines the inventive works that have emerged from this small nation. Many of its films touch on traumatic national events of the past but play with rarely explored genres in the region. Case in point: the country’s recent Oscar submission, “The Settlers,” about Chile’s bloody colonial 1901 battle in its south, is a neo-Western.
Helmed by animation mavens Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, “The Hyperboreans” (“Los Hiperbóreos”) combines live action and stop-motion animation in a story that also stands out for its singularity. In it, Chilean actress and psychologist Antonia Giesen films a script from her patient’s mind, leading to a reality-bending spiral when she discovers it originates from Nazi poet Miguel Serrano.
“We planned this as an exhibition of the filming process at an art gallery in Chile, so we filmed this in a single space and with only one actress,...
Helmed by animation mavens Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, “The Hyperboreans” (“Los Hiperbóreos”) combines live action and stop-motion animation in a story that also stands out for its singularity. In it, Chilean actress and psychologist Antonia Giesen films a script from her patient’s mind, leading to a reality-bending spiral when she discovers it originates from Nazi poet Miguel Serrano.
“We planned this as an exhibition of the filming process at an art gallery in Chile, so we filmed this in a single space and with only one actress,...
- 5/14/2024
- by Anna Marie de la Fuente
- Variety Film + TV
"I had no choice but to take refuge in the spiritual world." There's an early promo trailer available for a peculiar, mind-bending, strangely fun new film titled The Hyperboreans, from the one-of-a-kind Chilean filmmakers Joaquín Cociña & Cristóbal León. It's premiering at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival this week in the Directors' Fortnight sidebar. Here's their full intro: "Following their first feature-length animated film The Wolf House (2018), the Chilean duo are back, mixing puppets, stop-motion and live-action, theatre, science fiction, and real and fabricated biopic. In the liminal space of a big studio, our only guide is a woman – by turns storyteller, actress and illusionist – who interacts with Méliès-style cardboard sets and effigies, following in the footsteps of a very real man: the Chilean neo-Nazi dandy Miguel Serrano (1917-2009), a writer and the originator of delirious esoteric theories. Should he be viewed as a fascinating anomaly or symbolic of a deeper evil?...
- 5/13/2024
- by Alex Billington
- firstshowing.net
After crafting one of the most formally fascinating stop-motion films of the last decade with The Wolf House, Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León followed it up with the Ari Aster-backed short Los Huesos. Now the Chilean directors return with The Hyperboreans (Los Hiperbóreos), a Directors’ Fortnight selection at this year’s Cannes Film Festival that blends live-action and stop-motion in meta fashion. Ahead of that premiere, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the first trailer and poster. The feature, seeking distribution, will be repped by Bendita Film Sales at the festival.
Here’s the synopsis: “Actress and psychologist Antonia Giesen decides to film a script revealed by a voice within the mind of one of her patients. Seeking collaboration with the filmmaking duo León & Cociña, they craft a crossroads of theatre, science fiction, animation and fabulated biopic, populated by parallel worlds and haunted by the shadow of a Chilean...
Here’s the synopsis: “Actress and psychologist Antonia Giesen decides to film a script revealed by a voice within the mind of one of her patients. Seeking collaboration with the filmmaking duo León & Cociña, they craft a crossroads of theatre, science fiction, animation and fabulated biopic, populated by parallel worlds and haunted by the shadow of a Chilean...
- 5/13/2024
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
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