A cinema that is lyrical, autobiographical, and deeply attentive to the emotional textures of family and youth, with the landscape allowing for her players to explore moments of transition, Dominga Sotomayor’s cinema is one that drifts and observes intimacy and sensorial storytelling. The Chilean filmmaker first debuted in 2012 with Thursday Till Sunday preeming at Rotterdam (it won the Tiger Award), her sophomore feature Mar was selected for the 2015 Berlinale. 2018’s Too Late to Die Young landed her the Leopard for Best Direction at the Locarno Film Festival, while her first feature in Cannes was a short in the anthology film The Year of the Everlasting Storm (2021). She recently caught us off guard when she premiered 2025’s Limpia (Swim To Me) at the San Sebastian Film Festival just before a Netflix drop. Here is everything we know so far … for Dominga Sotomayor’s La Perra.
Sotomayor had Niebla on the stove top, but the tale, a set on cruise ship drama with a mid 30’s female protagonist was leapfrogged when producer Rodrigo Teixeira brought out the book to film project instead — an adaptation of the novel by Colombian writer Pilar Quintana. Official first tidbit of news came late last year, and filming would have taken place around the months of October and November moving the story (and some story elements) from the Colombian Amazon rainforest in the novel to an island in southern Chile.
Set on a remote island in southern Chile, La Perra follows Silvia (Manuela Oyarzún), a solitary middle-aged woman with a painful past, who rescues an abandoned puppy and names her Yuri — the name she once chose for the daughter she never had. As their bond deepens, Silvia pours all of herself into trying to set right a destiny she long believed beyond repair.
Selton Mello, Manuela Oyarzún, David Gaete, Giannina Fruttero, and Amparo Noguera are the players here.
Scribe Inés Bortagaray (Karim Aïnouz’s Invisible Life) helped write the project which was produced by RT Features’ Rodrigo Teixeira, Berta Marchiori, Planta’s Fernando Bascuñán.
While Cannes is a possiblity, we feel this will be a contender for the Locarno Golden Leopard or the Venice Golden Lion plus San Sebastián Golden Shell premiere. CAA Media Finance is handling sales.
