Women-Themed Stories Lead Oscar International Feature Film Race

Looking outside America this Oscar season, there are plenty of candidates for the Best International Feature award. You might gravitate to Latvia’s Cannes entry Flow, a dialogue-free animation in which a black cat, a bird and a ragtag band of other creatures fight for survival in a human-free world after a catastrophic flood. Or maybe you’ll fancy the chances of raucous Irish-language Sundance comedy Kneecap, a wildly stylized biopic of the English-baiting, all-male hip-hop trio from Belfast.

But these two are outliers; the international Oscar race this year is dominated by stories of women, from all over the world. For example, the U.K.’s Hindi-language drama Santosh, filmed in Uttar Pradesh, Northern India, finds a policeman’s widow thrown into her late husband’s world, where she must battle police indifference and solve the murder of a low-caste local girl. From Bulgaria there is Triumph, a political satire starring Borat’s sidekick Maria Bakalova as a psychic drawn into a paranormal search for national glory. And although Norway’s entry is called Armand, it’s actually a vehicle for Renate Reinsve, who plays a single mother pulled into a conflict at school when her son, the film’s unseen title character, is accused of bullying.

Narrowing things down to the final five, there is sure to be support for Belgium’s Julie Keeps Quiet, which bowed in Critics’ Week at Cannes. Introducing charismatic newcomer Tessa Van den Broeck as Julie, and very much in the slow-burn tradition of local auteur Chantal Akerman, this narratively slight but emotionally powerful character study from first-timer Leonardo Van Dijl concerns a teenage tennis player whose coach, Jeremy, is accused of inappropriate behavior with his students. Julie fiercely fights in Jeremy’s corner, but something is not quite right — and, in the end, that something has to give.

There’s a similar vibe to Magnus von Horn’s The Girl with the Needle, which debuted in Cannes’ Competition and, although its director holds Swedish and Polish citizenship, is representing Denmark. Set in Copenhagen during World War I, the film stars Vic Carmen Sonne as Karoline, a seamstress whose soldier husband goes missing in action. Karoline falls pregnant, loses her job, and meets the mysterious Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), a friendly matriarch who runs a candy store and an adoption agency. Dagmar seems too good to be true — and she is. International festival favorite Dyrholm is the draw here.

Two more Cannes titles look set to make the cut, notably Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, filmed undercover in Iran against the backdrop of the rebellious Woman, Life, Freedom movement and smuggled out by its dissident director shortly before he left the country for good. Then there’s Jacques Audiard’s avant-garde musical Emilia Pérez — filmed in Paris but set in Mexico — which stars Spanish-born trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón in a dual role, playing a fearsome Mexican cartel leader who fakes their own death in order to give up the gangster life and start over again as a woman.

Ever since Bong Joon-ho’s Korean-language Parasite swept up six nominations in 2020 — winning for Director and Screenplay alongside Best Picture and Best International Feature — Hollywood has been on the lookout for another non-U.S. film to break out. Both I’m Still Here and Emilia Pérez could pop out of the international ghetto, notably for their directors. In fact, the Best Director category is not so impervious to subtitled movies: Fellini’s La Dolce Vita in 1961, Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes in 1965 and Costa-Gavras’ Z in 1969. Similarly, voters have been receptive to foreign-language actors over the years too, recognizing performances from Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, Liv Ullman, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz and more, although Loren and Cotillard are the only two actresses to win Best Actress for a non-English language performance.

Gascón has a chance to make that elite club three, but she will have stiff competition from Fernanda Torres, who plays the lead in Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, which won Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival this year and is representing Brazil in the international category. The true story of Rio de Janeiro’s Paiva family, whose lives were torn apart in 1971 when their much-loved patriarch Rubens was taken away from them by the brutal military dictatorship, Salles’ film has struck a chord with audiences all over the world.

On paper, it sounds like a very academic exercise, or perhaps even an exorcism, since there is a whole genre of films from South America — notably Chile and Argentina — that deal with the traumas of the past by confronting them head on. I’m Still Here, however, is very different. It doesn’t do any of the things you might expect it to, since it’s not, as you might expect, a David and Goliath story, where you root for the underdog and the bad guys get their comeuppance in the final cathartic act. Instead, as the title suggests, it’s about defiance, and the ground you give away when you give in.

To explain, Torres plays Rubens’ wife Eunice, who somehow finds her voice while raising a family and dealing with an almost unimaginable loss. It’s a subject Torres has thought about a lot on her journey with Salles since the premiere in Venice. “It’s a very unique film,” she muses. “And it’s different, you see, because it provokes reactions that films are not provoking anymore. There’s a kind of honesty. We don’t look like we are acting, but at the same time it’s not a documentary. And that’s on purpose. Walter disappears into the movie; he doesn’t try to show off. Nobody’s showing off. It’s a very unique film. Every time I watch it, I look at it and say, ‘What an enormous movie.’” She laughs. “Very strange!”

Salles echoes this sentiment, and credits Torres with the film’s quiet, unassuming power. “To play this woman was so vital to the film as a whole,” he says. “She had to be able to say so much with so little, because this is a role based on restraint. Yet it’s based on the possibility of expressing the extraordinary inner strength that’s driving that woman. Within what appears to be a very limited bandwidth, she had to say a lot with very little. Fernanda is the only actress, I believe, that could have done that.”

But aside from that performance, I’m Still Here has a resonance in this year’s awards conversation for a much more specific reason. In 1998, not only did Salles’ streetwise, comic-dramatic road movie Central Station make the international shortlist too, his leading lady, Fernanda Montenegro, broke out with a nomination for Best Actress — both at the Oscars and the Golden Globes — as the film’s reluctant heroine. Montenegro, now 95, is Torres’s mother, and even appears in I’m Still Here as the older Eunice, now struggling with Alzheimer’s.

Her daughter looks back at her mother’s surprise flush of success with great fondness. “She was 70 at the time,” says Torres. “I remember her telling me, ‘‘Nanda, I’m 70 years old now. I’ve done everything I wanted to do in my life, I’ve played all the characters I wanted to play. I think it’s time to close my door. It’s over, I think. What more can I expect?’ But then… Oscar!” She laughs. “And she didn’t stop, even after that. Every year she says, ‘No, next year I have to stop. I can’t work the way I’ve been working.’ She’s a workaholic. A severe workaholic. I mean, she’s shooting now!”

Torres seems to have inherited her mother’s irrepressible spirit, which is why she sees only the upside of I’m Still Here, for all its darkness. “It’s not a sad movie,” she insists. “Come on, there’s no reason to do a movie about the dictatorship in Brazil. Why would I go to a movie theater to see a movie — another one — about the dictatorship in Brazil? No. It’s a movie about endurance. It’s about endurance, in happiness and in love.”