Five years since directing a segment of the anthology film “The Year of the Everlasting Storm,” renowned Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor is back in Cannes with “La Perra.” Premiering at Directors’ Fortnight, the film is based on Pilar Quintana’s eponymous book and produced by Chile’s Planta in co-production with Brazil’s RT Features.
“La Perra” stars Manuela Oyarzún as Silvia, a woman whose quiet life on a remote island off the Chilean coast is shaken by the arrival of stray puppy Yuri, who stirs in her a long-suppressed longing for motherhood. When Yuri goes missing, Silvia’s childhood trauma comes to the surface, forcing the woman to confront a still very much present past. The tender drama also stars Selton Mello (“I’m Still Here”) and David Gaete (“A Place Called Dignity”).
Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s premiere at the Croisette, Sotomayor says she was drawn to working on her first-ever adaptation after speaking to famed Brazilian producer Rodrigo Teixeira, with whom she had previously collaborated on “Too Late to Die Young,” a film that saw her become the first woman to win a best director Leopard at Locarno.
“I wanted to continue our collaboration, and he had a lot of experience with adaptations,” she recalls. “He brought me this book when I was working on another original script that was a much bigger and more complex film, and I wanted to make something in between. I was also attracted to an adaptation after working on very personal films that took years to get made.”
“La Perra,” courtesy of Isidora Melo Ramírez
Sotomayor says she was drawn to how the book didn’t “romanticize the relationship between the dog and its owner.” “I find this idea of domestication and the relationship we have with animals to be very interesting. We project so many human feelings onto dogs, but then, in a split second, it bites someone, and we are confronted with the reality that this is an animal, and we can’t control its nature.”
Of the key changes the director made for her adaptation, the biggest one was changing the settings from the depths of the Colombian jungle to a windy island off the southern coast of Chile. “It was important to find the right place because my films have always been tied to their location. When we heard about this island called Santa María, it was such a special encounter because it also felt foreign to me as a Chilean, as it is a place that doesn’t really feel like Chile. It also had a super curious local culture, like every island, so we decided to work the island into the story.”
The book also goes deeper into Silvia’s relationship to motherhood, but Sotomayor wanted to broach the subject with a certain subtlety on screen. “I naturally connected to this idea of this woman who could not become a mother and named a dog after the daughter she never had, but I felt cinema doesn’t need to overexplain. It was more interesting to me to investigate this deeper connection she felt to motherhood. The dog doesn’t stand for a child she never had, but something much more beautiful, which is opening this connection to feelings of delayed motherhood and a search for identity.”
“La Perra” features a key flashback that ties present Silvia to a jarring trauma from her childhood. Leading that chapter of the film is Brazilian star Mello. Sotomayor knew she needed a foreigner to play the role of the wealthy man who buys off the island, and she felt a Brazilian would fit this idea of foreignness without pandering to the clichés of white Europeans arriving in Latin America or having one of their Spanish-speaking neighbors in Argentina.
“Selton was lovely. He had watched my films and made himself available for a project together,” she says. “It’s also interesting because we have this sort of documentary style in the film, and then we have a star arrive, which felt to me like a great meta moment for the audience but also to Silvia, who gets to experience someone who doesn’t belong to the world she knows.”
Mello echoes the praise: “I was already a huge fan of Dominga’s work and how she crafts such sensitive films with a very particular, refined way of looking at the world.” “When she invited me to the film, it was so special because I play someone who is a bridge to the main character’s past, someone intricately tied to tragedy. I loved every single moment of understanding that weight and that tension, as well as every minute I spent in Chile, learning from Dominga and understanding the history of her country. I felt overwhelmed with a sense of my Latinidad.”
The flashback also allowed Sotomayor to play with the formal presentation of time in her story. “I didn’t want a flashback to work solely as a way of quickly explaining the story that is taking place in the present, but to be an emotional capsule with its own emotional logic. We gave ourselves a lot of freedom with time and space because we weren’t interested in making a documentary. We constructed all the locations and invented an island. I think it’s amazing to be able to invent a geography and a time and to have this freedom to work on the interplay between what is real and what we were inventing about that reality.”
As for keeping the title as “La Perra” instead of the literal English translation of “The Bitch,” the director says it was a “natural” decision due to the “violent” stigma the word has to women. “To me, the title carried this heavy weight I did not want for the film.” Sotomayor also adds that she is “thrilled” that the two Chilean films from Chilean directors in Cannes this year, hers and Manuela Martelli’s “The Meltdown” — the first-ever film by a female Chilean director in Un Certain Regard — are directed by women.
“It is very impressive for a country like Chile, that has a very small, very precarious industry, to have this presence in Cannes,” she says. “There are only five Latin American films in the program and two are from Chile and directed by women, which I think deserves to be celebrated.”
Sotomayor emphasizes that this success “did not happen out of nowhere.” “It is the byproduct of a continuous effort by film producers and the government to support Chilean cinema. At a moment when cultural funding is at risk, it is super important to emphasize these are not isolated talents, it is not luck, it is the result of several years of work supporting the development of an industry.”
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