Niles Atallah Takes Us Into A Twisted Utopia With The First Trailer For ‘Merrimundi’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Chilean-American filmmaker Niles Atallah has given Cartoon Brew exclusive access to the trailer for his short film Merrimundi, a surreal, stop-motion sci-fi musical that world premiered at the Venice Film Festival and screens this week at Zinebi.

The film, produced by Diluvio and Pista B and distributed by Miyu, continues Atallah’s long-established exploration of uncanny imagery, hybrid techniques, and the malleable boundaries between the human and the artificial.

Set in what the director calls a “twisted utopia,” Merrimundi conjures a hallucinatory realm where cherubic figures sing, melt, and reform in cycles of decay and rebirth. The trailer teases the short’s mixed-media aesthetic and interventions from CG artist and programmer Felipe Elgueta. Composer Paco Pasquette’s unsettling score backs the imagery with a destabilizing musical energy.

Atallah describes the film as “a cosmic Dadá sing-along, an ecstatic transmission from a sentient machine of the future trying to speak to us in our own crumbling tongue.” He positions Merrimundi as an exercise in artistic resistance: “In a world increasingly anesthetized by algorithmic uniformity, Merrimundi throws itself into mystic mayhem and chaos as a form of resistance.”

The director frames the short as part of a broader defense of creative autonomy. “Even when a work resists clear narrative or conventional meaning, it expresses a political stance: one that celebrates multiplicity over conformity, poetry over programming,” he says. “Merrimundi is not a roadmap; it is a flare shot into the void, an invitation to reimagine.”

Based in Santiago, Chile, Atallah’s previous films include Animalia Paradoxa (2024), Rey (2017), and Lucía (2010), as well as shorts Vitanuova (2023), Subterranean Light (2021), and Lucía y Luis (2007–08), the latter co-directed with local stop-motion legends Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, with whom he co-founded production company Diluvio.