Amazon’s first locally-produced original series in Chile takes on sexual abusers and the systems that protect them. Showrun by Lucía Puenzo (“The German Doctor”), “La Jauría” (“The Pack”) sees two cops trying to solve the abduction of Blanca, a young woman who was leading a protest against her school and its administrators for their hiring and enabling a sexual predator. Variety debuted the first trailer for the eight-part thriller.
“Belmar is covering up!” a student yells in the spot. “Ossandón is a sexual abuser and he’s been covering for him all these years.” Another scene depicts a demonstration featuring dozens of young women. “They kill and rape us and nobody cares!” they chant. “We want to be heard,” one of the protestors tells a journalist.
As the demonstrators make their grievances known to the school and the public, the police officers scramble to find Blanca. “A gender crime police unit formed by commissioners Elisa Murillo (Daniela Vega, ‘A Fantastic Woman’) and Olivia Fernández (Antonia Zegers, ‘The Club,’ ‘A Fantastic Woman’), conduct a frantic search to find Blanca after a video goes viral of her being raped by a gang of unidentifiable men,” the source synopsizes. “Blanca’s younger sister soon discovers online that the rapists were a pack, and part of a social media test, ‘Wolf Game,’ which encourages multiple packs to identify, stalk, mark, and rape young girls.”
“Blanca is alive,” Fernández notes in the trailer, “but we don’t know for how long.”
Puenzo co-wrote “La Jauría” and shares directing duties with Marialy Rivas (“Young & Wild”), Sergio Castro (“La Mujer de Barro”), and Nicolás Puenzo (“Los Invisibles”). Her other credits include “Cromo,” “XXY,” and “The Fish Child.” Next, she’ll direct Jessica Chastain in “Losing Clementine,” a dramedy about a tortured artist.
As Lucía Puenzo told Variety, she and the “La Jauría” team “really needed to go deep into all those spaces that that gender violence can occupy. In the last two years the word abuse has been redefined.” She explained, “For example, now we understand a teacher looking at her underaged student in a sexual way is a form of abuse. Maybe years ago, that wasn’t the case. Also, abuse resonates not just with direct victims, but it poisons society and undermines everything that we are, and it affects the men in these women’s’ lives as well as the women themselves.”
“La Jauría” will stream exclusively on Prime Video in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain, with a premiere date TBA. It is also set to hit Series Mania-MipTV’s virtual international marketplace.
