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 Nazi writer as a demonic figure.”
“Since 2007, we have worked as a duo on projects primarily centered around film practice, regularly employing frame-by-frame animation. Around our film projects, other types of works have grown, such as installations, paintings, relational activities, drawings, and sculptures. Our work is fundamentally interdisciplinary, drawing resources from both visual arts and the worlds of film and animation,” said the directors.
“With The Hyperboreans, we aim to create a dialogue between political terror and fantasy, between the organic, ritualism, and material entropy,” they continue. “The Hyperboreans continues an idea that has traversed all our works, starting with Lucía, our first short film, where we sought to make a film about the process of drawing and erasing. We want to create works about processes. We are interested in works that show their bones, embracing the organic, accidental, precarious, unfinished, and constantly growing in contrast to the precise, controlled, or defined. We try to imagine that everything is material and can therefore be transformed. This includes politics, history, and the unconscious. In the narratives presented here, not only do painting and other materials mix, but so do political visions, official history, and dreams.”
See the exclusive trailer below.
