Ari Aster, Lars Knudsen Board Cristóbal León, Joaquín Cociña’s New Film

Ari Aster and his producing partner Lars Knudsen have boarded Chile’s Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña’s new film “Hansel & Gretel” as executive producers through their company, Square Peg. 

The Chilean duo’s feature “The Hyperboreans” forms part of Cannes’ Directors’ Fortnight.

The story is expected to twist the fairy tale into inimitable shapes. “It’s our very personal adaptation of the classic fairy tale, with the main difference that Hansel and Gretel are both boys in this version, at least at the beginning of the story,” Cristóbal León told Variety. In this telling, “the story itself gets lost,” León added.

León and Cociña worked with Aster on “Beau is Afraid,” having come to his attention via their feature “The Wolf House,” a winner at Annecy described by Variety as “a jaw-dropping marriage of various animation techniques.” 

“Cociña and León are among the true originals working in animation right now. You can trace their sensibility back to several artists of the uncanny, but there is no real analogue for the effect that their work produces in the viewer,” Aster told Variety. 

“I’ve said before that they strike me as the successors to Švankmajer and the Quays, their obvious influences tracing all the way back to Starevich, but I have a feeling that they have already started building a unique tradition of their own.”

The duo’s use of experimental techniques, such as life-size stop-motion and stretching narrative structures to breaking point, puts them between three worlds: that of film, animation, and contemporary art. 

“We try hard to keep it experimental and not to feel like bureaucrats of artwork, you know, because in animation it’s really easy to become a slave to the decisions that you took previously,” said León.

The project benefited from pre-production development funding in Chile and is now moving on to seek co-production partners.