Donkey Princess / Princesa burro, the inventive new live-action feature from acclaimed Chilean directors Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (The Wolf House), will celebrate its North American Premiere at Fantastic Fest 2026, running September 17–24 in Austin, Texas, following its recent World Premiere at the Locarno Film Festival.
Loosely reimagining Charles Perrault's 17th-century fairy tale Donkeyskin—famously adapted for the screen by Jacques Demy—the film follows Princess Diana (Antonia Giesen), who defies a royal ban on love to be with Lalo. When he is exiled, Diana uses a magical bracelet to traverse parallel space-times in search of him. Her journey continually mutates as she passes through distinct cinematic genres: beginning in a classic fairy-tale realm, slipping into a domestic thriller, boarding a 1960s TV-style spaceship, and ultimately arriving at the starkness of physical reality as her quest descends into horror.
Crafted largely within an open gallery space at Matucana 100 in Santiago, Donkey Princess eschews modern CGI in favor of practical, retro techniques. León and Cociña constructed the film's multidimensional universe before a live audience using rear-projected scale models, hand-drawn illustrations, and painted backdrops. This handmade approach gives the film a tangible, analogue quality that evokes mid-century genre productions while retaining the duo’s unmistakable visual language. The film features an original score by Jean-Benoît Dunckel, one half of the acclaimed French electronic duo Air.
Emerging from the same creative cycle as The Wolf House and The Hyperboreans, Donkey Princess stands as the duo’s most narrative-driven work to date. By channeling classic genre tropes through live-action performances, León and Cociña combine structured storytelling with their signature embrace of the organic and accidental, yielding a film that is equal parts monstrous, wild, and tender.
