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Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi, whose heartfelt documentaries “The Mole Agent” and “The Eternal Memory” earned her Academy Award nominations, agreed to step into the world of scripted fiction when Netflix and Pablo Larraín’s production company Fabula sent her the 2019 book “When Women Kill” (“Las Homicidas”) by Alia Trabucco Zerán.

The resulting screen adaption, “In Her Place” (“El lugar de la otra”), puts Alberdi back on the awards trail as Chile’s Oscar entry for the Best International Feature Film.

The original book details four real-life cases of women who committed murder but were pardoned during a time when the death penalty was still implemented in Chile. “It was the first nonfiction book by a writer who usually writes fiction. And this is my first fiction set in a non-fiction world,” Alberdi told IndieWire in Spanish via video call. “The crisscrossing was interesting.”

More than the specifics of the stories,...

In Her Place is a Chilean Netflix original that is a historical crime drama that circles around an author and the murder she committed in full public view. Based on a real-life incident that took place in the year 1955, the film has many characters in the form of witnesses and family members who offer a statement to the judge as the case goes to trial. One of the characters is fascinated by the alleged culprit, and she’s practically a voyeur as the case unfolds bit by bit.

Spoilers Ahead

Mercedes

Elisa Zulueta, the Chilean actress, is Mercedes, the court clerk, who is having a hard time with work and running her home at the same time. She is married and has two sons, and all of them live together inside a tiny apartment, and she is tired of the lack of personal space as the place is also being...

“In her place” is a Chilean Netflix film starring Elisa Zuleta and Francisca Lewin. It is directed by Maite Alberdi and based on the book by Alia Trabucco Zerán.

“In her place” is a dramatic film that begins as a thriller but gradually transforms into an intimate drama as the story unfolds. “In her place” stands out for its original approach, offering a different kind of cinema, a unique perspective, and an entirely distinct vision from what we are typically accustomed to.

Plot

A woman has coldly murdered her husband in plain view at a restaurant, using a firearm. There is no question that she is guilty. However, a woman working for the court sees another truth behind the eyes of the killer. As she delves deeper, she begins to uncover her own truths and starts to transform her own life.

About the Film

This film is a standout opportunity for actress Elisa Zulueta,...

Set in 1950s Chile, ‘In Her Place’ (Original title: El lugar de la otra) is based on the true story of Chilean writer María Carolina Geel, who was accused of killing her lover in a hotel. The film mainly follows Mercedes, a reclusive secretory of the judge in charge of the writer’s case. It explores María’s psychological state through Mercedes’ eyes and examines the skewed gender dynamics in the mid-20th century in Chile. Previously, the film premiered at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Seashell Award. Now, it is selected as Chile’s entry for Best International Feature at the 97th Academy Awards.

Spoilers Ahead

In Her Place Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:

‘In Her Place’ is a period crime drama that follows Mercedes, a secretary of the judge assigned to work on the case of a popular Chilean writer, accused of murdering her lover.

“Ladies and salesmen not allowed,” declares a sign outside a hotel in Fifties Santiago, Chile. Mousy court worker Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta) is outside, having sent a message to extract the judge she works for from his lunch appointment. It’s a task emblematic of her life, which is essentially being at the beck and call of men, not just at work but in the home she shares with her husband Efrain (Pablo Macaya) and their two grown sons.

Efrain is a photographer but it’s Mercedes who really has the skill set, passed down to her by her father, not that her husband notices. Although played with winning energy, Mercedes is bright and slight - perhaps because her character is a fictional one that has been slotted into a true crime framework. Maria Carolina Geel (Francisca Lewin), meanwhile, is the real deal, a successful author who famously, at least in Chile,...

The wonderful Raymond Carver story “Neighbors” perfectly evoked the strange out-of-body feeling that can come from occupying another person’s home when they’re not in it — the transient thrill of living someone else’s life, and the accompanying sense that it’s a little bigger and brighter than your own. That pang, at once delicious and dismaying, colors “In Her Place,” a peculiar mixture of true-crime riff, domestic melodrama and feminist fable that marks an uneasy venture into fiction for celebrated Chilean docmaker Maite Alberdi, who landed Oscar nominations for both “The Mole Agent” and “The Eternal Memory.”

There’s more shared DNA than you might think between Alberdi’s latest and her previous documentary work. In particular, the mixture of procedural storytelling, old-school genre tropes and whimsical human comedy that shaped the hard-to-classify hybrid “The Mole Agent,” a whodunnit-fashioned nursing home study, surfaces again in “In Her Place.

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 2, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 2, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 2, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Dames, right? It’s the quiet ones you have to watch, although the more flamboyant also require a vigilant eye, especially if said dame is packing a pistol. Mercedes (Elisa Zulueta) is the self-effacing secretary to a senior judge in Santiago, Chile; Maria Carolina Geel (Francisca Lewin) is a murderer. The year is 1955 and, somewhat incredibly, the crime and punishment described in Maite Alberdi’s skittish film In Her Place really happened.

This, in itself, would make a ripping yarn. Geel, a popular writer, gunned down her former lover over afternoon tea in the fanciest hotel in town. She was then remanded in a nunnery, given a derisory sentence — less than two years in jail — before being released with a presidential pardon. Alberdi, whose previous films include the uncategorizable hybrid comedy/documentary The Mole Agent, has turned those events into the bones of In Her Place. The flesh on those bones,...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2, 2024.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Entries for the 2025 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

The 97th Academy Awards is set to take place on March 3, 2025 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50%) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between November 1, 2023, and September 30, 2024. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 2.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is scheduled to...

Un drama de la cineasta de ‘The Eternal Memory’, basado en hechos reales. © Netflix

Netflix ha publicado el primer tráiler de El lugar de la otra, una película dirigida por Maite Alberdi (The Eternal Memory), que tendrá su estreno mundial en el Festival de San Sebastián, donde competirá por la Concha de Oro.

El lugar de la otra es un drama basado en hechos reales ambientado en Chile, 1955. Cuando la popular escritora María Carolina Geel asesina a su amante, el caso cautiva a Mercedes, la tímida secretaria del juez encargado del caso. Tras visitar el apartamento de la escritora, Mercedes empieza a cuestionarse su vida, su identidad y el papel de la mujer en la sociedad al encontrar allí un oasis de libertad.

La película chilena está protagonizada por Elisa Zulueta (Feroz) y Francisca Lewin (Secretos en el jardín).

El lugar de la otra se estrena el 11 de octubre en Netflix.

At long last, we now have at least one festival premiere set for one of our most-anticipated films of the year. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path, a remake of his superb, bad-vibes 1998 thriller that stars Damien Bonnard, Mathieu Amalric, Ko Shibasaki, and Drive My Car‘s Hidetoshi Nishijima, is now set for a premiere as part of San Sebastián Film Festival’s Official Selection.

Taking place September 20-28, the lineup also features the latest from Edward Berger, Gia Coppola, Costa-Gavras, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Mike Leigh, Diego Lerman, Joshua Oppenheimer, and François Ozon. While we could see Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Serpent’s Path pop up at other fall fests, it’s exciting to know it’s finally seeing the light of day.

Check out the full lineup below.

Bound In Heaven

Xin Huo (China)

Country(ies) of production: China

Cast: Ni Ni, You Zhou

This film narrates the poignant tale of a...

For Chile’s most celebrated documentarian Maite Alberdi, whose debut fiction pic “El lugar de la otra” vies for the Golden Shell at the 72nd San Sebastian Film Festival (Ssif), venturing into fiction filmmaking posed a number of challenges. But it also had its perks: it took her only a month to shoot the drama while it has taken her an average of five years each time to complete a documentary, two of which, “The Eternal Memory” and “The Mole Agent,” have garnered Oscar nominations.

Recreating ‘50s Santiago for her period film was no mean feat for her art department, led by Pamela Chamorro, given the paucity of buildings dating back from that era. “Earthquakes and the lack of government policies to preserve our architectural heritage, has seen few buildings of past eras still standing in Santiago,” Alberdi told Variety.

Working with a host of actors, numbering around 50, was also a new experience.

The San Sebastián Film Festival has revealed a bumper Official Selection for its latest edition, which will unfold from September 20 — 28.

The festival, which is celebrating its 72nd edition, will screen new films from established filmmakers such as Edward Berger, Gia Coppola, Costa-Gavras, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Mike Leigh, Diego Lerman, Joshua Oppenheimer, and François Ozon alongside works from new filmmakers including Laura Carreira and Xin Huo.

Coppola’s The Last Showgirl heads to San Sebastián following a debut in Toronto. The film stars Pamela Anderson, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Dave Bautista. The film’s plot follows a seasoned showgirl who must plan for her future when her show closes after a 30-year run. Also heading to Spain from The Six is Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, starring Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Michele Austin. The British-Spanish production is said to portray the everyday life of a London family, addressing such issues as family relations,...