‘The Gazelle Gazette’ Builds A Sports-Media Nightmare Out Of Newspaper (EXCLUSIVE TRAILER)

Newspaper isn’t just a visual motif in The Gazelle Gazette. It’s the scenery, the texture, and eventually something closer to a threat.

The experimental Chilean short from directors Simón Bucher and Cote Ramírez uses pixilation and a world constructed from newsprint to tell the story of Gisella Cortés, a promising runner transformed by the media into “The Gazelle.” As her victories turn her into a public sensation, the press pushes further into her life, and the athlete herself begins to disappear beneath the persona built around her.

The Gazelle Gazette will debut in the Animamundi section of the 33rd Valdivia International Film Festival, running October 12-18 in Chile. Ahead of the world premiere, Cartoon Brew is debuting the film’s trailer today.

For Bucher and Ramírez, the medium came before the story.

“The idea of using newspaper came before the story itself,” Bucher told Cartoon Brew. “First of all, there was a practical reason for working with newspaper: it was a material we could easily get without spending much, and we had the intuition that using only this material could create something immersive and visually appealing.”

Once they started looking for a story that belonged in that paper universe, sports provided the way in.

“Since we already wanted to work with newspaper, it made sense to tell something that crossed the world of sports with what the material itself could represent: the press,” Bucher explained.

The film takes that connection somewhere more physical than metaphor. Through pixilation, a real performer occupies a world made from newspaper and is gradually invaded and swallowed by it.

“We were interested in the radical contrast of having a real human being, flesh and blood, and seeing her invaded and absorbed by a world constructed from layer upon layer of newspaper,” said Bucher.

The Gazelle Gazette itself grew out of an unusually compressed production. Bucher and Ramírez made its first incarnation for the 48 Hour Film Project Santiago in 2025, unsure whether they could get the message they hoped to convey across in the short.

“Before seeing the first cut, we weren’t sure whether what we were thinking would really come across,” Bucher recalled. “But once we saw it, we felt that we were telling something, and that there was fertile ground to keep getting more out of what we had made.”

So they kept working on it for roughly another year. The extra time let them push the newspaper conceit well beyond what was possible in one frantic weekend.

“Visually and sonically, there was still a lot to explore to make the short as immersive and stimulating an experience as possible,” Bucher said. The filmmakers printed frames onto different kinds of paper, physically intervened in the images, incorporated stop-motion, and tested different post-production treatments to give the film its own visual personality.

They approached the soundtrack with the same question: What should a world made of newspaper actually sound like?

“We needed to better understand what the atmosphere of this newspaper world was and what sounds could complement the Gazelle’s inner world,” Bucher explained. “We believe it’s important for projects to have some time to rest, so ideas can flourish that couldn’t be explored at first.”

The Gazelle Gazette was produced by Bucher and Ramírez alongside Cristóbal León of Diluvio and Francisco Cortés. Macarena Barros stars as the Gazelle.