Diluvio

Lucía is a young woman who works as a seamstress in a factory and lives with her father in an old house in Santiago, Chile. The film occurs in December 2006 during the weeks that take place from the ex-dictator Pinochet’s funeral to Christmas Eve. Through the simple observation of Lucía’s daily life, the spectator is allowed access into a hidden and neglected world of a generation of Chileans striving to recover from the military dictatorship.

A series of shorts drawn with charcoal about characters that are destroyed within the narrative and the drawing animated process.

After escaping from a religious colony in Chile, Maria seeks shelter in a mansion where she’s taken in by two pigs, its only inhabitants. Like in a stop-motion dream, the universe of the house reacts to her feelings. The animals slowly morph into humans and the house into a dark, menacing world.

Using human corpses and invoking the spirits of two damned Secretaries of State, a girl performs a ritual to free the kingdom of Chile from its feudal heritage.

A stately home, built in 1922, is now a dilapidated stage where memories and history are present in the old home movies starring those that once inhabited it.

In a world eaten by darkness, a ghostly interference conveys the tale of two souls who, in their final act of love, cast a spell to become a candle: An eternal flame that defies the infinite gloom. Through the distorted echo, its light flickers like a whisper of resistance in an endless abyss.

The lives of Luhli and Lucina, two especially important artists in the alternative cultural scene during the 1970s. In a time when transgression, love and peace guided behavior, we discover the love of two women for art, their spiritual universe, their lives in community and their three-way relationship with photographer Luiz Fernando Borges da Fonseca.

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.

In the nineteenth century, a French adventurer sets off to establish a kingdom in the inhospitable South of Chile, uniting the feared Mapuche under him. The response of the Chilean army is devastating.

A twisted utopia unfolds, as singing cherubs melt to the sound of decay. Crafted by a sentient machine from the future, it unveils its own version of paradise.

Cinematic memorial, designed to echo the names and memories of the underage victims of forced disappearance during the military dictatorship.

"Golpe a golpe" (Family coup) was a Chilean television sitcom from the 1970s and 1980s. In this series, the family of the stern anti-communist dictator Augusto Pinochet found themselves forced to share their home with the spirit of the late former socialist president Salvador Allende, who was portrayed by a puppet. This short film aims to salvage this show's existence by extracting fragments from its surviving material.

Jaime Guzmán, the main ideologist of the Pinochet dictatorship and author of the Chilean Constitution, slips into a witch's dream. She confronts her different personifications and tries to drive away her visitor using witchcraft. She curses, sings, dances and reintroduces herself in alternative versions of herself.

In "Los Andes", a restless primal spirit takes possession of an office room. Drawings appear on the walls, plant-like forms sprout from the computer and overgrow the desktop. As it finds it way trough the office space, the mysterious entity transforms into the limbs of a giant and dissolves again.

An enigmatic figure, half-goddess, half-child, combining the smoothness of a doll and the materiality of clay, will be our guide as we cross time and space, and our history. - N. Feodoroff

Several reels of film are buried in a forest in sourthern Chile. Ten years later the films are unearthed from the soil and projected. Ghosts have appeared on the surface of the decaying celulloid, they are the protagonists of Niles Atallah's earlier feature films "Lucia" and "Rey". The fictional characters have returned to haunt the images, peering through the layers of earth, as if interested in us, the spectators who watch them. Who is looking at who? Why have these characters returned? What do they want? The film is a secret code written by the earth itself.

The list of fantastic, mythical animals compiled by Carl Linnaeus in his seminal 18th century work Systema Naturae could well be the seed of Niles Atallah’s Animalia Paradoxa – an eccentric tale set in a post-apocalyptic world that follows a strange creature struggling to survive. Dressed in rags and a gas mask, moving like an alien dancer, Animalia roams through an abandoned building – crawling and stretching across concrete, plastic, waste. She laboriously carries and fills up an array of empty bottles to enjoy a modest bath. The camera eye lingers on her with compassion and explores the architectures of trash at an agonising pace. We know in our hearts that Animalia is a human-amphibian longing for the sea…

Between 2010 and 2011, Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña created the series of short-films “The Third World”. The series is made up of “Padre.Madre”, “EL Templo” and “El Arca”. The films were shown together as a film installation at Upstream Gallery. These films are the foundational chapters of a new creed. They present a savage procession, moving between sacred and intimate, beautiful and horrific, canonical and arbitrary, sublime and bestial. Every film is the beginning of a myth and also its immediate decadence.