Chilean filmmaker and multimedia artist Niles Atallah is a master at building mesmeric worlds — and Animalia Paradoxa (2024), which had its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, is perhaps his most haunting to date.
It plays out in a gauzy and bleached-out, dying realm of depleted resources and the litter of analogue technology, where just a few solitary survivors and collectors pass desperate and shell-shocked days, with slim vestiges of magical knowledge to draw upon. They dream of evolving into forms that can survive an increasingly poisonous habitat, but risk becoming the grist for strange sorcery and transmutations. Mostly wordless, the film will more easily hook those with a taste for experimentation and shimmering atmosphere over straightforward plot propulsion, but few could be left unswayed by the beauty of the craft on display and the utterly distinctive look of this stop-motion animation and live-action blend, which is punctuated by black-and-white footage of spewing lava, landslides and other natural disasters, as it evokes a land and bodies in cataclysmic flux.
Atallah was previously awarded at Rotterdam for his second feature Rey (2017), a comparably hallucinogenic dreamscape on the border of history and myth that also sprang from a fascination with cinema’s materials and the transformations wrought by time (it incorporated buried and exhumed film stock), which reinterpreted the Mapuche legend of a nineteenth-century French adventurer who founded his own kingdom. Atallah’s short films are also highly regarded on the festival circuit, and his recent Vitanuova (2023) similarly explored extinction and hyper-mechanisation. Animalia Paradoxa feeds into a wider body of work that is endlessly inventive and deeply uneasy about the pressing issues of these dark times, be they imperialistic rule or a pillaged Earth and species collapse.
Mass extinction has quietly crept up on an unnamed land in proximity to the sea, where fragmentary voices played back on old reel-to-reel machines are the only link to memories of the beauty and lush plant life of the deeps. Animalia, a rangy and rag-clothed creature so dust-encrusted she merges with her surroundings, moves through the dilapidated environs in a gas mask to guard against the noxious air. She fills and hauls plastic bottles, and drops broken trinkets and toys into a hand with long, green fingernails that emerges ritualistically each day from a hole in the wall, the face of its owner unseen. Her skin glittering and almost translucent, she curls up in a daily bath to partake in some sort of strange emulsion process, in impossibly gradual pursuit of her aquatic aspirations which provide the only shimmer of hope for future continuity in a more watery state.
In this post-apocalyptic, wind-blown wasteland of building husks, exposed pipelines and the detritus of film stock left to its obsolescence, scarce moments of communion with others come mainly as barter for survival, with a currency of scraps, trash and arcane information about possible escapes. Among the other lone, semi-human inhabitants are a wraithlike woman suspended by her long hair like a slumbering bat, figures in animal masks that peer with trepidation from the upper windows of buildings, and an agitator with a loudspeaker who shouts prophesies of storms, serpents and plagues as her followers drag a body in chains.
Desire and compassion still flicker sporadically, but not all in this crumbling realm are to be trusted. A trick by a covetous dissembler, preying on Animalia’s desperate yearning to reach the sea and the more amphibious possibilities for existence it enables, transports us into a miniature, red-draped theatre overseen by a behatted puppet tyrant with violent designs. The fluid segues between actors made unreal, in a half-way state of transmutation in a world that can no longer support their survival, to a domain of creaking, breakable marionettes, embodying the very real alienation and pain of current political realities, make Animalia Paradoxa a stunning, haunting work of the imagination, and a melancholic song for a declining planet.
Director, screenwriter: Niles Atallah
Cast: Andrea Gomez
Producer: Catalina Vergara
Cinematographer: Matias Illanes
Editor: Mayra Moran
Production design: Natalia Geisse
Sound design: Claudio Vargas
Production company: Globo Rojo Films
Sales: Compañía de Cine
Festival: Rotterdam (Harbour)
In Spanish
80 minutes
