Chilean directors Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña talk about their latest film, Donkey Princess, presented in the International Competition of the Locarno Film Festival.

Cineuropa: The film has a certain dimension that can be read as feminist, but at the same time, it maintains a very complex relationship with fairy-tale traditions. How did you approach that idea?
Cristóbal León, Joaquín Cociña: Our processes are very non-linear. It’s always hard for us to map out a precise route and say where an idea came from, because it usually emerges from many places at once. After our first feature, The Wolf House, we began a writing process with Alejandra Moffat, our co-screenwriter. We had several ideas. On the one hand, we wanted to adapt a work by Roberto Bolaño, who for us is a fundamental Chilean writer within Latin American literature. But we also had another idea that ended up becoming, perhaps, the beating heart of this film: revisiting the movies of our childhood. Generally speaking, we start from the structures of fairy tales, and we do that for many reasons. We love the fairy-tale tradition because, in a sense, it offers models of the real world: everything is reduced down to tropes, to fairly stable categories. Besides, we come from the world of animation, and animation has historically been closely linked to those tales. So we always keep that structure as a kind of foundation. These are stories that deeply permeated our subconscious in early childhood; they’re a sort of primary myth of our Western culture. That’s why it’s very easy to spontaneously associate new stories with those archetypes. They’re archetypal precisely because they distil the essential problems of life: conflicts with parents, love, desire, fear.

Many of these stories are being revisited today from a feminist point of view. But in Donkey Princess, it seems you’re not simply trying to correct a sexist story and turn it into a feminist one.
There’s something we do, sometimes very rationally and other times less consciously: instead of correcting a sexist story to give it a feminist perspective, we turn up the volume on the sexist elements to such an extent that it ends up reading as a critical vision. Deep down, we find it much more fun to do the opposite of what our contemporary political ethics dictate.

Music plays a very important role in Donkey Princess. How did you come to work with Jean-Benoît Dunckel (of Air), and what were you looking for from him?
In our previous films, the music was quite improvised. We’d find tracks here and there, distort them at home and incorporate them into the movie. But Donkey Princess is the first film we've done with a more complex co-production structure, and we were lucky to work with Kim El Moumen. She suggested Jean-Benoît Dunckel. For us, it was mind-blowing. The film has a lot to do with our earliest influences, and Air is part of that universe. When Kim came up with Jean-Benoît’s name, it made perfect sense. Air’s early albums always gave us a strange feeling: they sounded like music we’d always known, as if it came from our earliest childhood, even though it was completely new. They had that quality of being familiar and unknown at the same time. We felt that could do the film a lot of good. Despite being a superstar in France, Jean-Benoît was very open to notes and to listening to what we wanted as directors. We wanted the music to accompany the movie as a kind of emotional glue. It needed to be different in places because it referenced very different worlds, yet at the same time, it had to bind all of the parts together. And that’s not easy. That’s why we needed someone with great creativity and artistic sensitivity.

There also seems to be a very clear desire to make a pop film, even though your cinema is considered very "out there" or experimental.
Yes, absolutely. We make very odd films, and I think we try to counterbalance that with something pop. In this feature, there are loads of references to Chilean pop culture that international audiences won’t always recognise. There are characters, Chilean tracks that appear as diegetic music, and many elements of our popular culture. It made a lot of sense to us that the musician composing the score should be a pop musician, someone who came from that world and had that sensitivity to song and popular music. We wanted that pop sensibility because it was organic to the film’s universe. At its heart, Donkey Princess springs from that exact encounter between the strange, the distorted, and the profoundly pop and recognisable.