León and Cociña's Donkey Princess Premieres at Locarno
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- Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña premiered their third feature "Donkey Princess" at the Locarno Film Festival's international competition, continuing the Chilean duo's signature hybrid of stop-motion, puppetry, and live-action filmmaking that first turned heads on "The Wolf House."
- "Donkey Princess" stars Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana in a script co-written with novelist Alejandra Moffat, riffing on Perrault's "Donkeyskin" — a tale about a princess suffocated by her father's obsessive, patriarchal kingdom.
- Production designer Natalia Geisse built the kingdom's ramshackle world from cake-frosting-textured turrets, fiberglass mountain formations, and dry-branch forests, tinted in "queasy shades of turquoise and puce" to evoke a realm "not made to last."
- The plot sends Diana to contemporary Chile where she and banished love interest Lalo (Andrew Bargsted) live parallel lives in the pest control business, but her father follows as an aging invalid stripped of his powers yet still "plenty burdensome."
- The film concludes with a surprising shift toward near-total realism — what Variety calls "the biggest surprise from these most feverishly world-building of filmmakers."
- The review positions "Donkey Princess" as "an intriguingly transitional work" that consolidates León and Cociña's auteur status and has "the right balance of accessible and avant-garde components" for life beyond the festival circuit, even if it doesn't quite match "The Wolf House" for emotional intensity.
Why it matters: For León and Cociña, "Donkey Princess" cements their auteur status after the breakthrough of "The Wolf House" and positions them as filmmakers with nowhere to go but outward — the film marks their return to adult fairytale terrain after the denser "The Hyperboreans," pairing festival-ready invention with enough accessibility to travel well beyond Locarno.
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