A character study set on a windswept island off Chile’s southern coast centers on Silvia, a 40-something childless islander who sells seaweed and lives in isolation. She adopts a stray puppy found along the shore, named Yuri, and the animal disrupts her solitary routine. The film focuses on the relationship between confined landscapes and the people who move through them, showing how place influences self-perception. The puppy is not used as a simple symbol or emotional shortcut. Cinematography shifts attention toward the dog at times, emphasizing the animal as a meaningful presence with its own role in the story.
"Back to selectionDominga 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 (2025) zoomed in on an affluent villa in present-day Santiago."
"So it is for Sotomayor's Cannes-premiering , 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, 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 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 's Cannes premiere, "the extent to which an animal can ever really be ." 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, trainin"
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]