DONKEY PRINCESS

After the death of her mother, Princess Diana is raised by her grieving father in the Kingdom of Chile. The king finds solace in crafting whimsical toys for his daughter while imposing a cruel decree: anyone who succumbs to the plague of love will be exiled to the Valley of Thorns.

On her birthday, Diana encounters Lalo, a young huaso (Chilean cowboy) whose unexplainable arrival awakens forbidden feelings she has never experienced. Smitten by the princess, he gives her a magical bracelet capable of granting any wish, with the caveat that each wish transports its owner to another kingdom in another time, potentially harming those one loves. The couple’s affair is discovered and Lalo is banished to the Valley of Thorns; Diana, heartbroken, uses the bracelet's wish-granting capabilities to reunite with him, embarking on a journey across space and time.

Taking Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Donkeyskin” as a guiding star, DONKEY PRINCESS reimagines its themes of identity, abandonment, transformation, and the ways we reshape ourselves after trauma. Directors Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña continue expanding the visual language established in THE WOLF HOUSE and THE HYPERBOREANS, crafting a purely formalist live-action feature filled with magical handcrafted worlds and haunting beauty.

Rooted in Chilean pop culture and folklore while paying homage to the dreamlike aesthetics of Jan Švankmajer and Yuri Norstein, the filmmakers transform the different worlds' fears of the plague into an exploration of grief and the fantasies we create to escape our losses. DONKEY PRINCESS understands that longing can be both a source of hope and a trap, and that sometimes we just miss something simply because we imagine how extraordinary it could be.

Prepare yourself for a mesmerizing journey through love, loss, and rebirth; DONKEY PRINCESS is a fairy tale about the dangers of chasing impossible wishes and about finding the courage required to embrace the life that is already in front of us. (RAFAEL RODRIGUEZ)

*Paired with the short BOILING POINT dir. Ying Ze

When a barfly accidentally proves an uncanny talent for drinking boiling water, he is forced to keep outdoing himself to farm clicks and engagement on a livestream in this frenetic, whimsical Jeunet-esque delight.