The awards race for best international feature is sizing up to be one of a single, undeniable frontrunner and a diverse pack of contenders with strong upset potential.
The clear one to beat is Emilia Pérez. Jacques Audiard’s transgender Mexican cartel crime drama/musical, France’s entry, is on track for Academy Award nominations across several categories, including best picture, director, actress (for Karla Sofía Gascón), supporting actress (Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez) and multiple technical categories. Add to that Netflix’s marketing might, and Emilia looks as close to a sure thing as any title on Oscar’s dance card.
After that, the international competition gets harder to parse, but there are a handful of films that have emerged from the festival circuit with sufficient critical buzz and awards momentum to make them potential Pérez rivals.
Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, two deeply personal stories about life under authoritarian regimes, are clear favorites to make the final five.
I’m Still Here is the story of Eunice Paiva, wife of Brazilian Labour Party congressman Rubens Paiva and matriarch to a family of six children. Salles grew up with the Paiva family and knows their story intimately. When Rubens Paiva “disappeared” in 1971, a victim of Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship, his widow reinvented herself as a lawyer and activist to fight the regime. Critics are calling I’m Still Here Salles’ best film since his 1998 breakout Central Station, which scored Oscar noms for best international feature and best actress for Fernanda Montenegro. It was the last time a Brazilian film made the Academy cut. In a nice piece of cinematic symmetry, Montenegro’s daughter, Fernanda Torres, plays Eunice Paiva in I’m Still Here.
If Salles’ film is a reckoning with the sins of the past, Rasoulof’s Sacred Fig is a confrontation with the violence of present-day Iran. The film follows a conservative judge (his job is signing government death warrants) who is forced to choose between supporting the ruling mullahs and his own family, including two teenage daughters, who get caught up in Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Rasoulof shot the film in secret in Iran and escaped the country, fleeing an eight-year prison sentence, shortly before it premiered in Cannes, where it won a special jury award.
Iran would never choose a Rasoulof movie as its official Oscar submission, but the film qualified as German thanks to its Berlin co-producers and Rasoulof’s status as a refugee there. Sacred Fig offers Academy voters the rare chance to pick a film from a dissident director. Expect them to jump at the opportunity.
Political issues are at the core of two other international feature favorites: Mati Diop’s documentary film essay Dahomey (best film winner at the Berlinale) and Magnus von Horn’s black-and-white period drama The Girl With the Needle.
Dahomey, which is representing Senegal in the Oscar race, follows the return to the Republic of Benin of 26 royal African treasures looted by France from the Kingdom of Dahomey. Combining nonfiction filmmaking with elements of poetic fantasy — including having the artifacts speak their own voiceovers, implying these are not mere objects but living entities with real cultural power — Diop blurs the boundaries between narrative film and documentary while exploring the complicated legacy of colonialism on modern-day African identity.
The Girl With the Needle, Denmark’s contender, is set in early 1920s Copenhagen and tells of a vulnerable seamstress whose wealthy lover, after getting her pregnant, refuses to marry her. Given that abortion is still illegal, she has two options: a dangerous illegal termination involving a bathtub and sewing needle or carrying the baby to term and handing it over to a backstreet adoption agency. Abortion rights and women’s bodily autonomy are likely on many Academy voters’ minds ahead of a second Donald Trump presidency, making this depressingly timely.
Rounding out this season’s international feature faves are two films with little to connect them other than the audacity of their directors. Armand, Norway’s Oscar contender, stars The Worst Person in the World breakout Renate Reinsve as a put-upon mother called in for a school meeting where she is confronted with an allegation her son assaulted another boy. So far so normal, but writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel adds deliberately theatrical sequences — including a couple of choreographed dance routines — to give a surreal sheen to what would otherwise seem a run-of-the-mill social-issue drama.
Iceland’s entry is radical in its unfashionable straightforwardness. Director Baltasar Kormákur’s Touch is a heart-on-its-sleeve romance about a man who sets out to find his first love 50 years after she disappeared. Kormákur, better know for shoot-’em-up actioners (2 Guns, Contraband) and survival thrillers (Everest, Beast) ditches big set pieces and twisty plot reveals in favor of a deeply layered turn on the old tale that It’s Never Too Late. The Academy’s die-hard romantics will find it hard to resist.
This story first appeared in a January stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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