Joaquín Cociña And Cristóbal León Discuss Their New Short ‘Los Huesos,’ Premiering Today At Venice Film Fest

Premiering today at the Venice Film Festival, Los Huesos’ Directors Cociña and León spoke to Cartoon Brew via Zoom to discuss the origins of their fictional archival film.

Cartoon Brew: Which came first: a fake archival filmmaking story or concept?

Cristobal Leon: We never have just one starting point. We have a lot of ideas that we try to connect. Sometimes we forget an idea, but it’s still there, you know. We have very confusing processes.

One of the starting points is that we are in the middle of a social uprising in Chile in 2019. We call it “Estallido Social” which means social explosion. We inherited the political system of a dictatorship. The gap between rich and poor is widening. It’s a very unfair system. So this is the context in which we started thinking about this production. We take two figures from Chilean history, one from the 19th century and the other from the 20th century. Both are defenders of the oligarchy. We want to remove these leaders somehow and free Chile from this oppression. We are not taking ourselves too seriously. It’s not like we thought our movie would change anything.

Joaquin Cocina: Another context is the history of cinema. We need to create a fake creative mind behind the movie that is not us. It gives us more freedom and distance. We were also interested in early cinema. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was this amazing creation. There’s Georges Méliès, a fantasy film magician; then you’ve got a more documentary-style approach from the Lumière brothers. Two different streams. We’re trying to approach projects with those early years in mind. With Los Huesos, the idea is very raw. We are pretending that we are creating the first cartoon. We think it’s funny to imagine that Chili is the birthplace of cartoons. Then we think about [Ladislas] Starewicz’s first films were made with carcasses of animals and insects. We think they are very beautiful. So we imagined that we were animating corpses in the early 21st century. We found that funny.

Speaking of corpses, non-Chilean viewers (like me) may not know who these two ‘corpse’ are in the movie.

Leon: In fact, they are copies of our bodies. Joaquín is the guy with the glasses. The other guy looked a bit like me, so we decided that I would be that guy.

Joaquin Cocina: Diego Portales was a political figure who was a defender of the oligarchy in the late 19th century. He became a hero of the right-wing conservative movement in Chile. He may be the President but he is not interested.

Leon: He was an entrepreneur who used politics to make things easier for his business. We grew up in the Pinochet dictatorship in the 1970s. In our history books from that time, Portales is praised for bringing order to modern Chile.

Cocina: Jaime Guzman [the figure with the glasses] is the brains behind the Pinochet dictatorship.

Is Constanza based on a historical figure?

Cocina: She is the mother of Diego Portales’ children. She was 14 years old when they were having some form of sex. She had three children with him. He was never married to her, which was a terrible thing to do at the time. She was sick and locked up for the rest of her life. Her children were taken away. The story goes that she couldn’t stop waiting for Portales to marry her.

What’s fascinating is that it has roots as deep as Los Huesos located in Chilean history, international audiences can still connect with the film on different levels. When I first saw the film, it sparked thoughts about the murders of Indigenous children at these gruesome Canadian residential schools.

Leon: We wanted to make a film that was local but also universal. We designed Constanza with a Chilean in mind because we wanted that extra layer.

Technically, you’ve done a remarkable job recreating this so-called historical drama. The lighting, character design, and pacing are all reminiscent of early cartoons.

Leon: We only create in-camera animations. We do not use any software. I love the dark room of the camera, where you never know how it will turn out. The 16mm camera is perfect because you don’t know what’s going on. We enjoy accidents, bringing mistakes into the process. I enjoy the mystery of not knowing what will come out of the camera.

Cocina: We also avoid rushing to cut. In early cinema, scenes were longer and often repeated.

What is your approach to music? How did Tim Fain end part of the production?

Cocina: This is our first time calling a musician. In older movies, the music was performed directly in front of an audience. We wanted to do something based on the Chilean musicians of the time. Chilean musicians later copied European musicians like Chopin. Adam Butterfield [who became executive producer] saw the movie and wanted to be in. He knew Tim Fain and recommended him.

Leon: Our only instruction was that it should be like Chopin but from hell. A very demonic and distorted version of Chopin. At one point, I came up with the idea of ​​tuning into a station that broadcasts stations from other dimensions.

For such a dark film, there’s a lot of humor: the picture shows you both as cavemen in one scene; visible tangles; wrong body parts on corpses; Private parts are covered by a glove.

Leon: Almost all of our work begins with jokes. The truth is I want to say this honestly, we always like to do funny things, but the results are always amazing. We seem to be bad comedians. But we will work on it. We try to have fun. I’m drawn to artists who combine comedy and horror, like Jordan Peele. I think art is very much about connecting seemingly separate emotions.

Let’s end with everyone’s favorite question: what are you doing right now?

Leon: We are working on a temporary movie called Los Angeles, and this will be our first attempt to combine animation and real people into a feature film. This is a film where we try to revisit, in our own way, the history of fantasy cinema, with its many different techniques and aesthetics. We are in the rewrite phase and looking for co-sponsors.