La Perra

Dominga Sotomayor’s cinema is one of confined spaces. Her features tend to unfurl in tight, growingly claustrophobic settings. In her 2012 debut Thursday till Sunday, the action took place by and large inside a car en route to the beaches of northern Chile; her festival prizewinning breakout Too Late to Die Young (2018) never strayed beyond the confines of a bohemian commune at the dawn of the country’s post-Pinochet era; and her Netflix-produced Swim to Me (2025) zoomed in on an affluent villa in present-day Santiago. So it is for Sotomayor’s Cannes-premiering La Perra, a character study set on a windswept island off Chile’s southern coast. Like its predecessors, Sotomayor’s latest is principally concerned with the relationship between those spaces and the characters who traverse them—in other words, the way landscapes wind up shaping how we see ourselves and our place in the world. Unlike those earlier films, however, it does not crib its story directly from the director’s childhood, pushing Sotomayor into uncharted waters.
Adapted from Pilar Quintana’s 2017 novel of the same name and co-written with Inés Bortagaray, La Perra centers on Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún), a 40-something childless islander who ekes out a living selling seaweed and one day adopts a stray puppy she finds along the shore. Named after the Mexican pop star whose 1980s hits punctuate Clint Mansell’s score, Yuri upends Silvia’s solitary life, but what’s most thrilling about La Perra is Sotomayor’s refusal to treat the animal as a trite metaphor. “I’m interested in the concept of domestication,” Sotomayor told me as we spoke ahead of La Perra’s Cannes premiere, “the extent to which an animal can ever really be ours.” The mutt isn’t there to propel Silvia’s character arc or compensate for some emotional vacuum, but serves as a protagonist in her own right. It is telling that, early on, cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo momentarily abandons the woman’s perspective to adjust to the dog’s, training his camera on Yuri as she runs free around the beach.
But the film itself seems unwilling to play by the rules. Much like Sotomayor’s finest works, La Perra feels cumulatively disorienting, hanging as it does in a sort of temporal limbo. Smartphones and present-day cars crop up alongside vintage TV sets and other props from previous decades. Even as the action winds back in time to account for an unresolved childhood trauma—Sotomayor’s first flashback sequence—the way these period details mix makes it hard to tell when exactly any of it takes place. La Perra is the kind of film that invites you to luxuriate in its enigmas, slowly splintering into something far more mysterious than its straightforward premise suggests. 
Filmmaker: This is your second book adaptation after Swim to Me, and arguably the first film of yours that doesn’t register as autobiographical. How did you feel about making that jump? 
Dominga Sotomayor: It was interesting. True, I had to set aside my own stories for a change, but I think that when you move away from those private realms you often wind up finding things that are even more personal and intimate. It’s a beautiful contradiction. Working on La Perra gave me a lot more freedom and lightness, which is something I find very fascinating about adaptations.
Too Late to Die Young and Thursday till Sunday were projects I had carried with me emotionally for many years—they were very difficult to finance, especially in Chile. But they were also very attached to my childhood and reflected this idea of making fiction by reconstructing the blurrier parts of one’s memory. So the idea of working with a preexisting text—stuff that was already “digested,” and by another woman, to boot—was super interesting. It’s not your material, but it becomes yours in the end. It’s another kind of freedom, and I think that’s what makes La Perra in many ways a rawer, more obscure work.
I’m not sure the jump you mention was a conscious decision—I rather think of it as the culmination of a much bigger journey. Also I was feeling a little tired of digging up my own memories; I thought it’d be a lot more interesting to make a film about another woman, who lived on an island I didn’t know. It was an exercise in empathy: an attempt to approach the unknown as opposed to straining to understand my own self. 

Filmmaker: What attracted you about Pilar Quintana’s novel, exactly? 
Sotomayor: I liked the book because it embodied the same qualities I like in cinema: there were lots of things in it that couldn’t be explained. I felt that the novel was pulling me somewhere; I wasn’t sure where, but I wanted to find out. Maybe it had to do with my interest in the relationship between humans, animals, and landscapes. I’ve always been fascinated by our connection with animals, and what intrigued me about the book was that the rapport between woman and dog remained somewhat mysterious. The dog wasn’t written as a cliché—she wasn’t your loyal “best friend,” or some kind of replacement for an emotional void. 
I’m interested in the concept of domestication, the extent to which an animal can ever really be ours. All my films revolve around the idea that the most familiar can become the most foreign. You see that in the family dynamics in Thursday till Sunday, or even in Too Late to Die Young, where people decide to hole up into a small community severed from the outside world, and the retreat, warm and cozy as it may initially seem, slowly becomes something threatening, exhausting. I think there’s something of that here, too. Silvia’s so warm and affectionate with Yuri, at first, but their relationship gradually turns into something else. And Yuri herself becomes a threat. 
Filmmaker: Could you speak about the genesis of the project?
Sotomayor: It was very spontaneous. I read the book and spoke with [producer] Rodrigo [Teixeira]. I told him I loved it but just couldn’t see myself setting it in Colombia. Not because I didn’t want to leave Chile but because I’d never been in that kind of jungle before, and had no idea what it was like to live there. If there’s something I’m absolutely not interested in it’s the idea of simply bringing a book to the screen—I just think that cinema has the potential to do so much more than that. And Rodrigo gave me the freedom to do with the book as I pleased.
Filmmaker: You made Swim to Me for Netflix; I’d love to hear more about your experience working for such distinct production structures, and the kind of freedom each granted you to pursue your vision. 
Sotomayor: Well, I value both projects, but Swim to Me was just a completely different thing. It was a Netflix commission I accepted because I was still granted some liberties—I could choose the cast, for one, which is something I really enjoy. But I still feel that La Perra is a film I made for the cinema, and that changes everything. It’s a completely free film. And you can’t take that creative freedom for granted. La Perra isn’t so small as a project, and I feel very lucky to have been able to work with such big producers who trusted me to do what I wanted. With Netflix, I knew what I was in for, and that the film needed to cater to a bigger audience. But the process itself isn’t all that different. I still connect a lot with characters and actors, and however different they might have been, I put a lot of affection into both projects. I made two films I consider polar opposites within the same year—we shot one in January and the other in October—which for me is unheard of, since I usually take six or eight to make one! 

I really like the idea of dispersed cinema. My films are all like that: diffused, meandering… And I knew I couldn’t do that with Netflix; they wanted a much more straightforward film. La Perra is much freer, formally, and I like it because I could explore things that felt…I wouldn’t say radical, but they were new to me all the same. Whereas with Swim to Me I relied on tools I already knew—working with children, with the lead actress. It was super fun because it was a performance-heavy film, and though La Perra is also very much based on performances it’s also about this relationship between people and landscapes. In that, I think La Perra is a lot closer to my earlier works: it follows their same interest in that permeable border between the human and the non-human. 
Filmmaker: One of the film’s most ambiguous aspects is the way you play with time. Sure, you give us some markers, but it can be difficult to tell when the action unfolds. Could you speak about that atemporality?
Sotomayor: I’ve always been intrigued by that. I think cinema has less to do with linear time than with the kind that we imagine or remember. La Perra itself feels out of time, and the setting itself is very strange. There was an interesting tension between the film’s fictional and its documentary dimension. No one had ever shot anything on Santa Maria, no one had captured the community and its lifestyles. And sure, I have enormous respect for these people and their culture, but it was always clear to me that this was not going to be a documentary about the place. I’m more attracted to fiction and invention. Plus, everything about the island is fake. We shot half the film on Santa Maria and the other half elsewhere. Silvia’s shack, or the abandoned beachside villa that she tends to—these were not on the island. We made up an imaginary geography, and that to me is the most fascinating thing: this idea of inventing a territory in a way that suggests a documentary but doesn’t turn the film into a mirror of reality.
Filmmaker: Maybe that’s why the flashback doesn’t really look like one. Films that employ that device often tend to underscore the jump in time by shooting past and present with a distinct palette, say, or using different clothes and props to demarcate the different eras. You deliberately avoid that here. Even as La Perra winds back a few decades in its middle section, it can be difficult to register the shift. 
Sotomayor: I hadn’t really thought about this but now that you ask… I’m not even sure what the “present-day” timeline is. This is the first time I use a flashback, and though I have plenty of respect for the device, for the possibility of going back to the past to say something about the present, “narrative” flashbacks never really appealed much to me. The past never existed to simply understand Silvia’s present but was its own standalone unit that tried to capture a feeling of her childhood. Which is why the film, with all its digressions and interruptions, feels so diffused.
Filmmaker: Another unconventional move I found very inspiring is your choice to embrace Yuri’s perspective as much as Silvia’s. There are moments throughout La Perra when you abandon the woman to follow the dog around the island. In the end, the film doesn’t have an unequivocal protagonist: it’s “about” both. 
Sotomayor: I think the whole film revolves around Yuri: all that happens to Silvia to some extent has to do with the dog, and I didn’t want Yuri to be some kind of symbol or a means to understand Silvia—I wanted it to be clear from the start that the film would concern both. That’s why I thought it was important that the first chapter would include Yuri’s own point of view. It’s not a digression but a statement: we’re not going to follow Silvia around Yuri, but the two characters as independent figures. They are pursuing their own identities, their freedom. Yuri just wants to do her thing—run around, meet other animals, eat whatever she finds—and Silvia wants the same, so it’s only natural that their paths will lead them to spend time alone. 

Filmmaker: You cast two dogs to play Yuri—a puppy and her adult version. Did they come from the island? More broadly, how did you manage to “direct” them?
Sotomayor: The dogs in La Perra are all mutts; I didn’t want a pedigree dog. We went to a few animal shelters around Santiago until we found adult Yuri—just a month before the shoot! She was not trained; she was just one year old and had so much wild energy. A member of the crew wound up adopting her, and we started to arrange lots of sessions between her and Manuela [Oyarzún], just so that they could become familiar with each other. It was very hard. There were times when the dog would just run away for miles in the middle of a scene and we had to stop everything. And then we went searching for baby Yuri, who had to look like her adult self. In the end we found a two-month-old puppy who’d been abandoned on a highway with her brothers. So the process was really not conventional at all: we had two trainers who were in charge of the dogs but at the same time a lot of Manuela’s performance was just based on her reactions to whatever the animals offered her.
Filmmaker: One thing that hasn’t changed much between this and your previous films is your predilection for enclosed locations. What attracts you about the idea of working within confined settings?
Sotomayor: I think it’s just my way of shrinking the world to look at it better. I always think of locations as a kind of framework through which you can observe things. If I like confined places, it’s because they can give me some limits, and I must learn how to move within those—which is great, otherwise things might get a little too broad. With La Perra, I loved the idea of conjuring an imaginary world, an island that didn’t necessarily conform to any real place. It almost feels like an Irish landscape, in retrospect—it looked like another country. 
This goes back to what you were saying earlier about the film’s atemporality: I liked the fact that the viewer wouldn’t be able to tell where exactly they were, that this could be anywhere in the world. And the stuff about the seaweed—that was all made up too! I’d done some research into the seaweed industry in Southern Chile but found that people tend to use plastic bags to carry the algae around, which didn’t strike me as particularly sexy! [Laughs.] So the opening sequence, where you see all those tractors ferrying mounds of seaweed to the port, that was something we invented. It’s something I love about cinema: this ability to create a fake reality and then document it as if it was real. 
Filmmaker: This is the first time you team up with cinematographer Simone D’Arcangelo, best known for shooting Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s The Settlers (2023) and Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s The Tale of King Crab (2021). How did your collaboration unfold? Did you work on a storyboard together?
Sotomayor: We didn’t have enough time to do an actual storyboard—but we brainstormed ideas and put together some kind of collage of pictures I’d taken from the island. I guess it was a storyboard of photos. And then we spent a couple of weeks sharing films and paintings that spoke to us. 

Filmmaker: Can I ask you which ones you discussed?
Sotomayor: My grandmother, Carmen Couve, and uncle, Adolfo Couve, are painters, and he was particularly fascinated by their work. So we started to work from those references, and other paintings that seemed to evoke the same atmosphere of Santa Maria—landscape paintings that had a very dramatic, 19th-century vibe to them, with their barren islands and bulbous clouds. And then we juxtaposed those to others that were completely different—paintings that had a more psychological approach, like those of Lucien Freud or Francis Bacon. 
As for the films we discussed, there was Wanda (1970), and another I discovered a few years back, Vengeance is Mine (1984), by Michael Roemer. It’s a TV movie with a very odd structure—it feels very German in terms of its very rigid mise-en-scène, but at the same time it’s quite meandering structurally, almost Antonioniesque—and of course L’avventura (1960) was another obvious touchstone. But there were Australian films, too: Walkabout (1971), for one, and Storm Boy (1976), about a boy who befriends some birds. I just like how the cinematic language in these Australian films feels so open. I tend to be quite strict in the way I set up my films, and I had to learn how to let go of the idea that each scene had to have its own logic. 
This is what I mean when I say that La Perra is very free. It was a very difficult shoot, more so than my other projects, but in the end, I think the film was able to react to those challenges, precisely because it was free. I remember complaining about all the difficulties we were experiencing with María Paz Grandjean, who starred in Swim to Me and has a little cameo here. She went, “But those difficulties are becoming the film’s language!” And I agree with that entirely. In the end, we found a way to react to those adversities that became part of the film’s fabric. We showed up on set with a certain idea of how things would play out, Simone and I, and had to adjust to the circumstances. It was a special project—spontaneous and liberating.