The cruelty of the Pinochetista dictatorship reaches the Oscars with “Beast”

Guillermo Azabal Los Angeles, 15 Mar One of the most gruesome episodes of the Chilean military dictatorship has a woman's name: Ingrid Olderöck, the head of intelligence who tortured dissidents using dogs of prey, and whose story has led director Hugo Covarrubias to the big screen in the short film “Beast”. A production that is nominated this year for the Oscar for best animated short and that has already received the respect and admiration of filmmakers such as Guillermo del Toro or Steven Spielberg. It is a film that deals with the cruelty of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) through the life of Olderöck (1944-2001), a woman as little known in society as she was remembered by her victims because of the brutality with which she raged against opponents of the regime. “We wanted to generate debate, get people to reflect,” Covarrubias (Santiago de Chile, 1977) explained to Efe, aware that part of the Chilean population will be wary of the short film. And, in just over fifteen minutes, this short film shows the social fracture that the Andean country continues to experience today, where reprisals and relatives of the victims still demand justice for a recent tragic past. THE SYMBOLISM OF TEXTURES Using the 'stop motion' technique - simulating movement through successive still images-, Covarrubias contrasts the soft textures of the materials with which the production environment is built with the porcelain that distinguishes the protagonist's face. “Porcelain looks hard but is fragile at the same time, and the rest of the components are made of a very cheap material that symbolizes the poverty that was triggered during the dictatorship,” the filmmaker said. In addition, in the animation process the character also took into account the origins of Olderöck: “He came from a Nazi family and we wanted to reflect it with the image of a German ceramic doll”. “We try to deceive the viewer with an affable aesthetic typical of a family film, but it really has a very macabre cut,” explained its director, who set the film's genre on a symbiosis between psychological thriller and human rights. With this narrative inspired by real events, the viewer will also delve into the insecurities of this intelligence agent. The scenes in which his doubts are revealed with his physiognomy when he stood in front of a mirror, as well as a repressed sexuality, contrast with the iron image projected to the outside and the macabre violence he applied as an executioner. Questions about human evil and its reasons arise in this short film in which the protagonist also transits from love for her dog to dark murderous instincts towards the animal itself, the result of “an unbalanced mind”. HUMAN RIGHTS IN AN ANIMATED SHORT FILM After a remarkable documentation process, “Bestia” is committed to a defense of human rights without resorting to the documentary genre, and inevitably fictioning a good part of the work. Also present at the interview with Efe, the film's executive producer, Tevo Díaz, highlighted the “good combination” between the animated short film format and the promotion of fundamental rights. The short was awarded this weekend at the world's leading animation awards, the Annie Awards, and in recent months it has won some thirty more awards that have brought this Chilean production to Germany, Spain, Croatia, Argentina, Mexico and Japan. In just two weeks, “Bestia” can crown its winners with the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film; something that Covarrubias did not rule out, who acknowledged that he would surely “break his voice” dedicating it to the survivors and disappeared of the Pinochetista dictatorship. CHIEF gac/bpm/rrt (photo) (video)