The Chilean artistic duo Leòn & Cociňa once again captures attention at the forefront of major European festivals with The Hyperboreans.
Presented at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2024, the feature film solidifies the directors’ presence in the international independent cinema scene, thanks to their innovative use of experimental stop-motion. This technique becomes a dark fable-like key through which to explore poignant chapters of their country’s history.
Their breakthrough feature film, titled The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo, 2018), already delved into the tragic era of Pinochet’s dictatorship through the lens of Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs. The same period was portrayed in their subsequent short film Los Huesos which premiered at the New Horizons section of the Venice International Film Festival in 2021, earning them a coveted award. In just a few minutes, with their characteristic dark and absurd humor, they narrated the story of a woman invoking spirits to resurrect the deceased Diego Portales (a defender of the late 19th-century oligarchy) and Jaime Guzman (the brain behind Pinochet’s dictatorship), echoing the strong social discontent that led to the protests known as the Estadillo Social between 2019 and 2020.
The concept of constructing a hauntingly obscure and magnificently unsettling stop-motion pseudo-archive film, inspired by early fantastical cinema pioneers like George Meliès, resurfaces in their 2024 work – a hybrid blend of visual arts, theater, cinema, and animation. The Hyperboreans mixes stop-motion, puppets, paper figures and live action to create a cocktail straddling sci-fi cinema, cartoons, and faux biopic, immersing viewers in an audiovisual delirium of intersecting worlds haunted by the demonic figure of a Chilean Nazi writer.
The film – co-written with author Alejandra Moffat – follows actress Antonia Giesen, portraying a version of herself as an actress and psychologist, as she narrates the story of a patient tormented by the voice of the deceased Nazi poet Miguel Serrano. The woman contacts Leòn & Cociňa to stage this tale, unaware of what awaits her. The film unfolds as an organic whirlwind where matter is transformed into a work in progress, encompassing history, politics, and the subconscious.
The power of their work stems from contrast: between past and present, innocence and horrific, simplicity and complexity. The crafted paper puppets, innocent in their creation yet delving into incendiary or ghastly themes, juxtapose the apparent simplicity of theatrical mise-en-scene with the intricate narrative of Nazism’s imprint on recent Chilean history.
With The Hyperboreans, Leòn & Cociňa in fact construct a delirious Chilean mythology through characters from its recent past, inspired by the delusions of Miguel Serrano, a Chilean poet, diplomat, and proponent of so-called Hitlerian esotericism. Serrano synthesized Indian and Nordic esoteric traditions, considering both of Aryan-Hyperborean origin. He elaborated Jung’s theory of the Aryan collective unconscious and identified Adolf Hitler as the avatar of the god Vishnu, while also merging theories of Hitler’s divine incarnation with Nazi UFO beliefs. He claimed that Hitler survived World War II, hiding in a secret Antarctic base in preparation for his great return to build the Fourth Reich.
This is the rambling that permeates the film, whose title is explained by these very theories (and by what is remembered as Ariosophy): in Greek mythology, the Hyperboreans were in fact semi-divine beings living in the north of Greece, considered a privileged people beloved by Apollo, and in Nazi esotericism they were deemed related to the Aryans.
The protagonist, actress-psychologist-auteur Antonia Giesen thus travels on this ghastly and almost hallucinatory journey, that confirms the artistic depth of the Chilean duo.
With this unsettling and courageously innovative work, Cristóbal León e Joaquín Cociña in fact once again hit the international festival scenes, reaffirming their role as animation innovators whose dark humor is a lens that can examine history’s folds and contradictions, that somehow always reflect on the present.
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