Oscar-nominated Chilean animated short, Bestia retraces the life of Ingrid Olderöck, employed by the secret police of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) to “break the souls” of opponents by inflicting sexual torture on them by dogs that she herself had trained.
“Ingrid Olderöck is someone who embodies the evil that reigned in Chile under the dictatorship”director Hugo Covarrubias, 44, told AFP in a studio at the Mapocho Cultural Center, a former train station in Santiago converted into a space for cultural creation and dissemination.
The origin of the film dates back to 2016 when the filmmaker decided to devote an animated series to little-known characters in Chilean political history. During numerous readings or interviews with historians, one name comes up: that of Ingrid Olderöck (1944-2001).
“Being a woman, she was dedicated to training women to torture women”, explains Hugo Covarrubias. He then decided to devote a film to the chilling story of this daughter of German Nazi sympathizers who organized the torture of left-wing activists in a clandestine detention center in Santiago.
The place, located in the east of Santiago, was called “Venda Sexy”. Inside, the prisoners, men and women, were permanently blindfolded and the music blared loudly to drown out “the cries of the tortured”recently told AFP Beatriz Bataszew, 66, a former activist of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) who was detained there in 1974.
“Ingrid Olderöck was dedicated to breaking souls, as obviously hers must have been broken at some point. She had many mental deviances, she was a very paranoid woman”says the director who worked for three years with a team of 20 people to bring the project to fruition.
The 15-minute film, without any dialogue, uses the stop-motion technique, which takes up that of the cartoon, but with objects. Ingrid Olderöck takes on the features of a beefy doll with a porcelain face without any expression.
For the director who has mastered this technique for twenty years, stop-motion “allows you to create worlds that would be difficult to create digitally. We use miniature sets made of cardboard and elaborate 25 centimeter characters made of articulated steel, fabric and polyurethane”, he details.
Through the film, which has already won awards at several festivals, including the short film festival in Clermont-Ferrand (France), and which is competing for the Oscars on March 27 in the “animated short film” category, “one of the aspects we wanted to highlight is the intimate relationship she had with her dog”. Ingrid Olderock “had three dogs, but in the short film we ‘fictionalized’ this part and showed the dog that meant the most to her, Volodya. Little by little we reveal what she was doing with this dog”, namely to train him so that he commits “acts of torture, mainly to rape women”.
In seventeen years of dictatorship, approximately 40,000 people have been tortured in Chile and 3,200 have been murdered or are still missing. In 2005, the National Commission on Political Prisons and Torture collected testimonies from 35,000 people, 13% of whom were women.
In addition to physical and psychological harm, almost all of them said they had been victims of sexual violence. In addition to the rapes by dogs, the victims described the pulses of electric current on the genitals and the introduction of mice into the vagina. Others said they were forced to have sex with their father or brother.
In 1981, on leaving her home, Ingrid Olderöck was attacked by two men who shot her in the head and another in the stomach, but she survived. She died ten years later without ever having been judged. For Hugo Covarrubias the film, centered on the figure of the torturer, is above all a “psychological fiction, where we go into her mind and try to show how this mental fragmentation ends up representing an entire country, the trauma of a country through the evil that this woman represents”.