Covarrubias: And then in early 2020, the pandemic began. I finished animating the short during the pandemic. I think some of the most important shots in the film were completed during the pandemic. Díaz: It was difficult because the figure of Ingrid is made of a resin that looks like porcelain and has fixed facial gestures. She only has six different expressions. Covarrubias: I had a lot of images in my head and we had to find the right moment to use them. There was a lot of philosophical work. It was like taking an essay about human evil and making it something visual with historical elements as the foundation. What we see are images from her fragmented mind, and the process was similar to that fragmentation. I would think of an image and then I attached it to another one to assemble the scenes.

Covarrubias: We used three types of resin: polyurethane resin as the base, crystal resin outside, which is like a coating, and inside it has expansive polyurethane resin so that it has volume but without weight. That way the interchangeable heads, easier to manipulate, are lighter and if they fall to the floor they won’t break.Covarrubias: We wanted to represent this woman as someone who isn’t sure about her place in society in relation to gender. This relates to the role that women had during the Holocaust, specifically the role that Nazi women had in juxtaposition to the Nazi men and to the Jewish women they murdered. Ingrid only tortured women, and she taught other women how to torture women. This creates a strange binary, because Ingrid in the end was almost like another man. Since she was a woman she was tasked with torturing women and instructing women, but what the women she tortured felt was that Ingrid was just like the men. We wanted to portray that inner conflict in the scenes where she tries to discover or recognize herself in her private life.

At the same time we wanted to show in a seemingly innocent way this doll as a kind of matryoshka with many layers, and for that the material was integral. The material also has a certain aesthetic and narrative qualities. For example, ceramic is cold, just as cold and as calculating as the character was for the acts she committed. It’s also rigid but fragile at the same time. If it falls it can easily break. That happens to Ingrid when they change her job. She becomes frustrated and suffers this attempted assassination that leaves a fracture in her mind, and that in turn reflects the fracture that dictatorship left in an entire country. The material itself becomes a narrator and is the spine of the short film.In 2016, Covarrubias was a co-creator Paper Port, a tv series aimed at young audiences that blends stop motion and 2d animation. Around the same time Covarrubias connected with Díaz, a filmmaker from the documentary world who had often implemented animation in his work as a compelling storytelling device. Bestia is their first collaboration. Following the first-ever Oscar win for Chile with the animated short Bear Story, the success of Bestia reaffirms a hope for a rapidly growing industry in the South American nation. Speaking via Zoom from Santiago, Covarrubias and Diaz walked us through the thematic labyrinth that their uncompromising short represents. The interview is accompanied by behind-the-scenes photos from the production of the film. The same happened again in 2019 after Chileans rose against continuing inequality and injustice. While the dictatorship-era constitution was abolished, politicians used it once again not to pay for their crimes. Bestia exposes how the powerful in Chile then and now can avoid punishment for such human rights abuses. The Dog Lady Considering the tone of his work, it may seem evident that Covarrubias cites the macabre undercurrents in the oeuvre of Czech animation masters such as Jiří Trnka and Jan Švankmajer as a major influence. “I started to develop an aesthetic that centered on the darkness within human beings, and by aesthetic I mean both in the narrative and the visuals.” And what was the reasoning behind limiting her expressions from a practical and narrative perspective?