As The Hollywood Reporter unveils an exclusive first look at Donkey Princess, we find ourselves invited into the third feature from Chile's Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociñia — filmmakers who have spent a decade turning the animated frame into a haunted house. Their Locarno-bound fairy tale does not simply tell a story of a banished lover; it weaponizes genre itself, asking each parallel world Diana crosses to rewrite the cinematic grammar she inhabits.
A Fairy Tale That Mutates With Every Frame
We meet Diana — played by Antonia Giesen, anchoring a cast that also includes Andrew Bargsted and Francisco Melo — as the princess of an ancient kingdom whose father, King Arthur, has outlawed love. When Diana falls for Lalo, the King banishes the young man, and our heroine straps on a magical bracelet and steps through reality itself. In a directors' note carried by the Locarno website, León and Cociñia frame the conceit with striking precision: "Diana travels through parallel worlds where each universe transforms the film's genre. The film brings this constant mutation of realities into live action, where fantasy reshapes everything." It is a description that reads less like a pitch and more like a manifesto — the same conviction that powered The Wolf House and The Hyperboreans, where dreams and nightmares were permitted to redraw the materiality of space.
Here, that idea has been adapted into a fiction feature performed entirely by actors, with cinematography by Benjamín Echazarreta and editing shared by Soledad Salfate, Maria Salazar, and the directors themselves. The screenplay is credited to Alejandra Moffat alongside León and Cociñia, with international sales handled by Bendita Film Sales.
Donkeyskin, Demy, and a Chilean Refraction
What makes the project worthy of our attention — beyond the obvious spectacle of a world-premiere launch at the 79th Locarno Film Festival's international competition this Friday, August 7 — is the lineage it knowingly inherits. León and Cociñia themselves cite Charles Perrault's Donkeyskin and Jacques Demy's later adaptation as the loose inspiration, and you can feel that ancestry pulsing beneath the genre-hopping surface: the velvet melancholy of Demy, the incest taboo and its violent paternal architecture, transposed now into a story about a woman who refuses the destiny imposed upon her.
"Donkey Princess is our way of reimagining the history of fantasy cinema: a film that engages with this tradition while presenting our own vision of the genre," the duo observe, and it is this generous, almost reverent dialogue with the canon — paired with their willingness to mutate it across registers — that positions the film as something more than an arthouse curiosity. As collaborators of Ari Aster and as heirs to an animist tradition that treats the screen itself as living matter, León and Cociñia are offering Locarno a premiere that argues, formally and emotionally, for the fairy tale as a site of genuine reinvention.
What to Watch From Here
We will be tracking the film's reception in Locarno's international competition closely, not least because the duo's track record — The Wolf House became one of the most discussed animated features of its decade — suggests that whatever surfaces on that Locarno screen on August 7 will not stay contained to the festival circuit. If the trailer is any indication, we are looking at a work that treats cinema less as a window and more as a wardrobe: every door opened yields a new genre, a new visual key, a new way of seeing the same yearning heart. For readers who have followed León and Cociñia from their earliest shorts, this is the moment that work has been building toward — a feature that does not settle, and asks us not to settle with it.