Special Report: Donkey Princess (2026)

Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña built their new film inside a Santiago museum, in front of a live audience, using rear-projected scale models and painted backdrops instead of CGI. The Chilean directing duo talk with Mike about Donkey Princess, their shape-shifting reimagining of the Donkeyskin fairy tale starring Antonia Giesen as Princess Diana.

León and Cociña describe the chaotic, caffeine-fueled process of splitting one overstuffed script into two films, Donkey Princess and its companion piece The Hyperboreans, written during Chile's 2019 social uprising and the pandemic that followed. They talk about the year and a half they spent animating a sequence for Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid, their resistance to letting the film's politics dictate its story even as an editor read it as being about patriarchy and dictatorship, and how Francisco Melo's own experience as a father reshaped the king's arc.

The directors also get into fairy tales as a shared cultural language, the six-stars-that-used-to-be-seven storytelling parable that keeps them hooked, and what's next — including a stop-motion adaptation of Hansel and Gretel. Donkey Princess, also starring Andrew Bargsted as Lalo, is awaiting North American distribution from KimStim, which previously released the duo's The Wolf House.


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