This week I interviewed the Chilean filmmaker Gabriel Osorio, who just won an Oscar at the 88th Academy Awards for his animated short film Historia de un Oso (“Bear Story”). It really is a bear of a story.
On the surface it is a richly animated tale of an anthropomorphized bear, estranged from his wife and child, who makes his living by creating ornate mechanical dioramas that tell the story of a bear family ripped apart when the Papa Bear is captured and forced to perform in a zoo. Here’s how Bloomberg View’s Mac Margolis describes it:
The beguiling 10-minute animated film, with no dialogue and a spare soundtrack, is not a children’s tale. The narrative centers on a solitary bear who spends his days, as if in exile, on a street corner, playing a story about his fractured family through the peephole of a mechanical diorama, a contraption with gears, belts and pop-up figurines. The effect is as magical as it is heart-rending.
The story takes on a whole new meaning when you realize that writer-director Osorio is drawing an allegory with the political disappearances, killings, and forced exiles that took place during Chile’s 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Osorio’s grandfather was one of the estimated 200,000 Chileans who fled or were forced into exile during Pinochet’s rule from 1973 to 1990.
In our Q&A that was published in Americas Quarterly, titled “How a Film About a Bear Got Chile to Reckon With Its Past,” the director told me how he got into art, what inspired this film, and how Chile’s first-ever Oscar is changing the political conversation today.
Here’s the trailer:
