Beauty and the beast

Cristóbal León (Santiago de Chile, 1980) and Joaquín Cociña (Concepción, Chile, 1980) filmed a fraction of their first feature film, entitled The Wolf House in the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. The film tells the story of a young German woman trapped inside a house. As the duo explain: “Every time she expresses her desire to leave in any way, the physical and temporal universe of the house disintegrates and rebuilds itself in a different way. In The Wolf House, everything; the house, the people and even time are as malleable as clay. The walls move, the people get older and younger and time flows in different directions.”

The work with multiplication and transformation, which is reflected in the script and the production strategy, is also present in the techniques used. León & Cociña took photographs of sculpture and drawing to make a stop-motion animation. The set was also an artist’s workshop, an installation and a set for a live performance.

The Wolf House was presented together with three short films by the same artists. Lucía and Luis were the first two films made by the artists and The Wolf House completes a trilogy that references fables, and horror stories for children. It also featured Los Andes, a recent short presented at the 55th Venice Biennale, the narrative of which explores esoteric Chilean mythologies inspired by Nazi religious sects in southern Chile such as Colonia Dignidad.

The artists Cristóbal León (Santiago de Chile, 1980) and Joaquín Cociña (Concepción, Chile, 1980), started working together in 2007, when, together with Niles Atallah they began production on the animation Lucía, Luis y el Lobo (Lucia, Luis and the Wolf). Their films have been shown at the Venice Biennale, the Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam and Youtube Play, a Biennal of Creative Video, a group show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. They have won several awards, including the ASIFA Austria Award and Best International Film at the Festival Internacional de Filmes de Fantoche in Switzerland.