Una vez la noche
(Once in the night)

Main characters: Veronica, Julio, Carolina and Cristobal. Let’s make it clear: twodimensional
main characters with the illusion of thickness taken away from them, (splendidly) drawned with traits and colored flat surfaces, and whose voices off camera are their only third dimension. Una Vez La Noche is a cartoon, as you have understood, but it stands out as a unique one at least twice. First of all, the pictures are still. Though not immersed in the power toons are granted – those infinitely loose, light creatures withdrawn from fatal passing – each and every motionless drawing here keeps pushing its traced line, only letting the next one go, almost regrettably, in extreme slow motion, as if all the shots sought to engrave themselves on our retinas so as to occupy the entire film every time, as in a phantasmic scene or a bad dream. Then, more crucially still, these plates’ style, and backwards from their insistance on screen, never ceases to vary. Including, within each story, and this is a highly significant point, the rejection of any and all correspondence between a character and the types of crayons or coloring, showing contempt for that coherence dictated by a destiny’s signature. Chilean film-maker Antonia Rossi, whose wonderful El Eco de las Canciones (FID 2010) we cherish in our memories, partially made with cartoon pictures and already devoted to the repetition of memory, has no fear – which we are deeply grateful to her for – of letting narratives and their thin vicissitudes move on in a rather chaotic atmosphere. As if the film-maker wished to pay tribute to the labyrinthic jumble of their details rather than the variety of adventures. Each and everyone of its characters is indeed on display, in the midst of the maze of the drawings’ traced lines, prisoner of his dreams, of his expectations, of his hopes. (JPR)