In October 2019, the social uprising in Chile closed the universities. Protests and disruption suspended the semester for months, and there was sustained violence in the streets — tear gas, and police shooting at people, day after day. Rather than stop teaching, Niles Atallah became a founding member of the Ojo Chile collective and opened an animation workshop at the Centro de Cine y Creación. The collective took its name from the police practice of deliberately aiming rubber bullets at protesters' eyes: hundreds of people suffered eye injuries, some losing their sight altogether. From October 2019 to January 2020 the workshop ran with open doors, almost daily. Students came from universities across Santiago, entirely voluntarily, to learn rotoscopy and hand-painted frame-by-frame animation.
The workshop was also a refuge. It was somewhere to come and rest, to socialise, to be creative, and to meet each other in turbulent times.
It was a response to the constant flood of violent images on social media, and a deliberate decision to work toward political mobilisation without making yet another documentary chronicle of the conflict. The images were filmed on the streets on simple cameras and phones, in the midst of the violence, and then transformed through paint, colour and collective action. What came out was another way of looking at what was happening in the country — images of hope, joy and celebration, focused on the change itself and on the dream of dignity and justice rather than on the violence. They were made to move people to action with immediacy. Never intended as short films, the clips went out on social media daily — sometimes several frame-by-frame animations in a single day, spontaneously made and launched in rapid succession. Groupings of those clips later circulated in festivals as short films — Archivos del estallido, Ojo Chile Megamix, Lastesis — but that was never their purpose. The material also fed into Hombre, a music video for Camila Moreno that credits close to fifty of the workshop's participants. At its height, around forty people were painting images in a single day. The workshop has since been studied in Cine Documental 22 and laFuga 24, among other publications.
Films made in the workshop
Hombre · Archivos del estallido · Lastesis · Ojo Chile Megamix