2023-05-05 10:00:14
The second season of “Star Wars: Visions”a cycle of animated short films inspired by the George Lucas film saga that this time featured a Chilean studio among those invited: punk robotthe same signature behind “Story of a Bear” (2014), the first Latin American short film to win an Oscar.
“We didn’t know how they worked, we got together the first time just to get to know each other. We knew that they don’t do animation, that they do their animations at home, in their studios. And toward the end of the pandemic, we were invited to do a story pitch, and we finally got the green light. But it is very different from how one imagines it”, tells the laureate and young national director Gabriel Osorio to BioBioChile.
“They gave us a lot of creative liberties, it was very different from how one imagines (to Disney), they gave us much more freedom than we thought we were going to have. And not only that: also the support to come up with the idea that we wanted to achieve, ”adds the filmmaker, a confessed fan of“ Star Wars ”since he was 4 years old, when he saw “The Empire Strikes Back” for the first time.
In “In the stars”the short film by punk robot, a context perfectly extrapolated to recent passages is narrated, and others “very, very distant” from the history of Chile. In the plot, two sisters (Koten and Tichina) face the Empire following it exterminates all the inhabitants of their hometown in search and conquest of natural resources. In this case, agua.
Since being an orphan, and following verifying the reality that haunts her, the younger sister is inspired by the memory of her deceased mother to confront the oppressors, represented on screen by an officer whose voice, in her Spanish version, intones Amparo Noguera. Tichina’s insurrection, however, annoys Koten, who still holds a grudge over the parent’s departure.
“The entire process of the short film was our work, from the script. The story is born from us, it is elaborated from our side, it is improved with Lucasfilm, and from then on all the production is made in Chile. The sound post-production was done in Skywalker Soundin San Francisco”, he highlights, highlighting the local nature of “In the stars”.
The inspiration of “In the stars”: the first Chilean short film of “Star Wars”
On the inspiration of the short film, which has nods to the selk’nam culture from the construction of its protagonists, Osorio points out: “As a studio, our goal is to tell stories that have meaning within the society we live in. We wanted to take advantage of this universe, which we love, and tell a story that made sense to us as Chileans and to be able to make a contribution to society and to reflect on who we ourselves are as Chileans”.
Regarding the creative limits established by Lucasfilm, the director assures that there were never any objections to the sociopolitical content of the script.
“Star Wars has always been political. This story that we are telling now is the same Star Wars story that has always been told.: colonization, mineral extraction. It is not something uniquely Chilean, it is something that has happened in all the colonies around the world. It’s a political issue, yes, but it’s not an issue that Star Wars has never touched on, it’s part of its universe,” he explained.
Osorio summarizes “In the stars” like this: “It is the story of two sisters who lose everything, their family and their people, due to this imperial invasion that For us it is a reflection of what happened especially in the south of Chile, in Patagonia, during the colonization period”.
The short film, which had a script by Osorio, the Chilean writer Francisco Ortega and Antonia Herrera (and the voices of Valentina Muhr and Kate Dickie in its English version), added two characters and a new planet to the “Star Wars” universe.
“That is in the script, not in the dialogue, but for the story we created a planet that is on the outer edge of the galaxy, a little bit on the edge of where the empire has come from, which in some way reflects us as Chileans being at the end of the world”, commented the director.
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