DNN: Dead News Network

Act IV of the Xicanx Opera Imperial Silence
Animated Short | 17 min | English, Spanish, Spanglish

Synopsis
When news stories die in the real world, they’re breaking in the afterlife. DNN: Dead News Network follows an undead news team as they report from Mictlán on censored headlines, surreal politics, and the skeletons in the closets of empire. In Spanglish with many subtitles, this Days of the Dead animated short brings you laughter from beyond the grave—and the stories no one else dares to cover.

Director’s Statement:

DNN: Dead News Network is an animated skeleton newscast broadcasting 24/7 from Mictlán, the Land of the Dead. In an age of disinformation, censorship, and vanishing attention spans, DNN offers bone-breaking coverage of stories buried too soon. Whether it’s the Million Muerto March, the War on Errorism, or the scandalous Heist of the Herst at the J. Paul Deady Museum, DNN digs up what others leave behind.

This short is the fourth act of our new media Xican@ opera, Imperial Silence, and continues in the tradition of political satire and social commentary embedded in the Día de los Muertos ethos. Here, the dead return not just to mock the living, but to report the news we’ve chosen to forget. Our newsroom is staffed with skeletal correspondents like Peter Deadings, Burt Donasque Dontatella, and Sister Wendy, who deliver their dispatches in Spanglish (with many subtitles), navigating everything from “Raves at the Rotunda” to weather reports from La Katrina’s Spotlight on Global Chillin’.

Like all good satire, DNN walks the line between absurdity and truth. Animation, in its limitless potential, allows us to reimagine journalism as something surreal and potent—where stories are more real than what actually happened, and skeletons can speak truth to power.

As artists working in the space between documentary and fiction, we recognize that stories don’t die—they linger in the afterlife, waiting for someone to dig them up. DNN is a media archaeology project, a digital exhumation of suppressed histories and censored headlines. Whether we’re parodying the Presidential Selection, unrenowned arts collectives, or geopolitical fences with names like the “Great Wall of Tucson,” our aim is the same: to confront historical amnesia with laughter, memory, and resistance.

— John Jota Leaños & Sean Levon Nash