'Donkey Princess' Premieres in Locarno Competition
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- Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña debuted their third feature "Donkey Princess" in Locarno's international competition, following 2018's "The Wolf House" (their stop-motion breakthrough) and 2024's "The Hyperboreans."
- The script, written by the directors with novelist Alejandra Moffat, riffs on Charles Perrault's 17th-century "Donkeyskin" — which the review notes "Disney ever dared touch" due to its discomfiting incest-themed premise, though Jacques Demy filmed it in 1970.
- Antonia Giesen ("The Hyperboreans" lead) stars as Princess Diana, suffocated by her patriarchal kingdom and overprotective widowed father (Francisco Melo), whose love ban has destabilized the realm.
- Production designer Natalia Geisse built the kingdom from toadstool turrets resembling cake frosting, fiberglass mountains, dry-branch forests, and 2D cartoon butterflies, tinted in what the review calls "queasy shades of turquoise and puce" — a world built not to last.
- Princess Diana is transported via a wish-granting bracelet to contemporary Chile, where she and love interest Lalo (Andrew Bargsted) live as parallel versions of themselves working together in pest control, while her father arrives too as an aging invalid stripped of his powers.
- The film concludes with a shift "toward near-total realism" — described as the biggest surprise from "these most feverishly world-building of filmmakers" — even as the review judges their most satisfying feature remains "The Wolf House."
Why it matters: León and Cociña's third Locarno competition entry cements their auteur status after the "Wolf House" breakthrough, and their choice of a source fairy tale Disney itself avoided for its incest themes — reframed here as paternal-control horror with a contemporary-Chile pest-control vocation for its princess — signals an ambitious tonal reach that could push their hybrid cinema beyond the festival circuit.
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