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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.
Nov 2017
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.
Sep 2018
Cinematic memorial, designed to echo the names and memories of the underage victims of forced disappearance during the military dictatorship.
Oct 2023
"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.
Nov 2022
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.
Sep 2012
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.
Aug 2023
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.
Nov 2024
Aug 2025
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.
Apr 2019
Jan 2010
An animation film in which two papier-mâché puppets are stalked in a sequence of sexual, bestial, and solemn acts. A ceremony which presents the beginning of a myth and its immediate decadence. (Part of the trilogy "The Third World." The films of the series "The Third World" are the foundational chapters of a new creed. They present a procession moving between sacred and intimate, beautiful and horrific, canonical and arbitrary.)
Jan 2011
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.
Aug 2011
"Nocturno de Chile" is composed of two videos: "La Cacería" ("The Hunt") and "La Cena" ("The Dinner"). Both videos are adaptations of Roberto Bolaño’s novel by the same title. The videos are meant to be viewed side by side, each video representing an adjacent room. In one room we find a dinner of intellectuals and writers; and in the neighboring room a torture is taking place.
Dec 2007
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.
Apr 2016
A series of shorts drawn with charcoal about characters that are destroyed within the narrative and the drawing animated process.
Apr 2010
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.
Apr 2013
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.
Mar 2022
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.
Oct 2025
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…
Dec 2024
One summer day the animals of the forest are invited to a party. They eat a ton of cake and dance all night long. When the party is over they find that all of the trees they use for shelter and food are gone. Strange creatures have stolen their homes, so they decide to go search for them.
May 2020