The award race for Best International Feature Film is becoming a contest between one clear frontrunner and a diverse group of nominees with the potential for an upset.
The clear winner is Emilia Perez. France’s entry, Jacques Audiard’s transgender Mexican cartel crime drama/musical, won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Carla Sofia Gascón), and Best Supporting Actress (Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez) is expected to be nominated for an Academy Award in several categories, including multiple technical awards. Category. Along with Netflix’s marketing muscle, Emilia looks as close to a sure thing as any title on the Oscar dance card.
After that, international competition becomes harder to parse, but there are several films that have emerged from the film festival circuit with enough critical buzz and awards momentum to be potential rivals to Perez.
Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, two deeply personal stories of life under authoritarian regimes, are clearly the last. This is one of my favorite books.
I’m Still Here tells the story of Eunice Paiva, the wife of Rubens Paiva, a member of the Brazilian Labor Party, and the matriarch of a family with six children. Salles grew up with the Paiva family and knows their story well. When Rubens Paiva, a victim of Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship, “disappeared” in 1971, his widow reinvented herself as a lawyer and activist fighting the regime. Critics have called “I’m Still Here Sales” the best film since 1998’s “Central Station,” which was a huge hit and received Oscar nominations for Best International Feature and Best Actress for Fernanda Montenegro. There is. This was the last time a Brazilian film won an Academy Award. In a wonderful work of cinematic symmetry, Montenegro’s daughter Fernanda Torres plays Eunice Paiva in I’m Still Here.
If Salles’ film is an atonement for past sins, Rasoulof’s The Sacred Fig is a confrontation with Iran’s present violence. The film is about a conservative judge (whose job is to sign the government’s death warrants) who either supports the ruling mullahs or his teenage daughter, who gets caught up in protests demanding women, life and freedom. This is a story in which he is forced to choose whether to support his family, including the two of them. Rasourov secretly shot the film in Iran and fled the country just before it was screened at Cannes, escaping an eight-year prison sentence and winning the Special Jury Prize.
Although Iran never selected Rasulov’s film as an official Oscar submission, thanks to Berlin’s co-producers and Rasulov’s refugee status, the film was certified as a German film. Sacred Fig offers Academy voters a rare opportunity to choose a film by a dissident director. Expect them to jump at this opportunity.
Two other international favorites: Mati Diop’s documentary film essay Dahomey (winner of Best Picture at the Berlin International Film Festival) and Magnus von Horn’s black-and-white period drama Girl with a Needle Political issues are at the core of the feature film.
Dahomey is representing Senegal in the Oscar race after 26 African royal treasures looted by France from the Kingdom of Dahomey were returned to the Republic of Benin. Combining elements of non-fiction filmmaking and poetic fantasy, including making artifacts speak their own narrations, the film suggests that these are not just objects, but living beings with real cultural power. I am. Diop blurs the lines between narrative film and documentary as he explores the complex legacy of colonialism in modern times. -day African identity.
The Danish nominee The Girl with the Needle is set in early 1920s Copenhagen and tells the story of a vulnerable seamstress who refuses to marry her wealthy lover after he impregnates her. Given that abortion remains illegal, she has two options. There are two options: a dangerous illegal abortion using a bathtub and a sewing needle, or the baby is carried to term and handed over to a backstreet adoption agency. This is depressingly timely, with abortion rights and women’s bodily autonomy likely on the minds of many Academy voters ahead of Donald Trump’s second term as president.
Rounding out this season of international feature films are two films with little connection other than the audacity of their directors. Norwegian Oscar nominee Armando stars alongside Renate Rijnsve in the blockbuster The Baddest Man in the World, in which a conceited mother is called to a school assembly to investigate allegations that her son has assaulted another boy. He is playing a role that confronts him. So far so average, but writer/director Halfdan Ullman Tonder adds intentionally theatrical sequences, including some choreographed dance routines, to give a run-of-the-mill social issue drama a surreal twist. It gives a shine.
Iceland’s entry is radical in its old-fashioned frankness. Directed by Baltasar Kormakır, Touch is a heartwarming romance about a man who begins searching for his first love 50 years after his girlfriend disappears. Best known for his shoot-’em-up action (Two Guns, Contraband) and survival thrillers (Everest, Beast), Kormakur ditches big set pieces and meandering plots for a deeply layered take on the old tale of It’s Never Too Late. We support the expansion. . The academy’s hardcore romantics will be hard to resist.
This article first appeared in The Hollywood Reporter’s January standalone issue. Click here to subscribe to receive the magazine.
