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 […]
by Leonardo Goi on May 18, 2026
The Settlers simulates several different types of Westerns without committing to one mode. The set-up of Felipe Gálvez’s first feature is classic: Scottish soldier MacLennan (Mark Stanley), American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and their Chilean mestizo guide Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), who’s been pressed into service from a chain gang, are sent on a mission by landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). Making their way on horseback across the Chilean landscape, the three are captured in long zooms and accompanied by the booming tympani of Harry Allouche’s orchestral score. If that music places The Settlers somewhere in the realm of ’50s westerns, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 11, 2024
The possibility and impossibility of community lies at the heart of Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s second feature film, Too Late To Die Young, which follows a group of young people living in a community being formed by their parents on the outskirts of Santiago. While the country is undergoing its own transition to democracy from the 17-year dictatorship of General Pinochet and their parents try to build a society that reflects their own values, the teenagers, particularly Sofía (Demian Hernández), seek to find their place in the world, all the while watched by a younger generation of children looking to emulate […]
by David Barker on May 31, 2019
The Los Angeles Film Festival is something of an oddity, not least because of its relative obscurity: for a 11-day-long cinematic event a stone’s throw away from the heart of the American film industry, it hardly registers on the local radar. As a reasonably cinema-savvy Angeleno, I don’t personally know anyone who gets more excited for it than they do for AFI Fest – my usual screening buddies either skipped LAFF entirely or only showed up for a handful of films this time around – though perhaps the comparison isn’t entirely valid. Where this is a “traditional” fest, with programming […]
by Michael Nordine on Jul 12, 2012