The Hyperboreans

Showcased in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Beau Is Afraid’s breakout animators turn Chile’s Neo-Nazi history into a nightmarish stop-motion meta-movie.

Actress and psychologist Antonia Giesen, playing herself, recruits real-life filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña to stage a one-woman show based on her experiences starring in a ‘lost’ movie and the writings of her patient named Metalhead. The production is haunted by the spectre of Miguel Serrano, a 20th-century fascist diplomat and occultist who believed that a living Hitler had fled to a paradise beneath Antarctica. Through Antonia’s memories, Metalhead’s dreams, outright homage to cinema pioneer Georges Méliès and numerous fourth-wall-breaking interludes, personal accounts collide with Serrano’s life story and Chile’s troubling history. Cociña and León are rising masters of employing trompe-l’œil techniques to provocative ends.

As with 2018’s The Wolf House, which recounts a German religious colony’s atrocities in Chile via stop-motion animation, the duo again uses unnerving papier-mâché puppets, handpainted sets and Lynchian dream/nightmare logic to capture the lingering effects of a horrific dictatorship. Their surrealist quasi-lessons interrogate how the past bleeds into the now, and The Hyperboreans shows how Serrano’s delusional beliefs have obvious, unsettling echoes in the conspiracy theories of the present day.

“An immersive experience … Yoking together ideas from Chile’s history, the occult, right-wing conspiracy theory, Jungian psychology, silent film and elsewhere, León and Cociña pull it all together by virtue of their mastery of technique.” – Screen Daily