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,...