Two films, two women directors, two female dogs. Sometimes the festival writes its own thematic through-lines.
The Palm Dog — the beloved unofficial awards show celebrating the best canine performances across the festival’s official selection and various sidebars — has long since become a genuine Cannes fixture, founded by Toby Rose back in 2001. This year it delivered a double bill of canine triumph that had the beach crowd at the Cannes Members Club reaching for their metaphorical hankies — and, perhaps not coincidentally, both winning performances came from female dogs in films helmed by female directors.
The main Palm Dog went to Yuri, the roguish stray at the heart of Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor’s La Perra, premiering in Directors’ Fortnight. Named by her new owner, Silvia after a Mexican pop star whose 1980s hits ricochet from a rickety TV, Yuri upends Silvia’s solitary existence on a windswept island off the southern coast of Chile, setting the protagonist on a journey of self-discovery that forces her to confront childhood traumas.
Sotomayor, who adapted the film from Pilar Quintana’s novel, was drawn to how the source material refused to romanticize the relationship between dog and owner, and to what she called the fascinating tension between domestication and an animal’s uncontrollable nature.
