Women Add to Diversity of Shortlist
Female lmmakers range from rookies to established directors
WWhen the Academy announced that this year’s pre-nomination shortlist in the international feature category would be expanded from 10 places to 15, many Oscar pundits voiced hope that this change would allow for more diversity in the selection — in terms of the stories being told, the cultures represented, and the individual artists behind them. The eventual shortlist largely lives up to these expectations: the final 15 are healthily spread across five continents, seven of them are by directors of color, while the subjects being tackled range from LGBTQ discrimination to indigenous trauma. When it comes to gender representation, the shortlist is record-breaking. In the 15 years the Academy’s international committee has practiced the shortlisting process, no more than three films from female directors have previously made the cut. This year, five did, making up one-third of the field. That ratio reflects the number of women among the initial submissions in the race: 33 of the record 93 entries were female-directed. When it comes to the final five nominees, the possibility of an all-female field might be remote; the fact that it’s a possibility at all, however, is progress. The Oscar nominations will be announced on March 15 and the
ceremony will take place April 25 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood. Gender aside, the five women on the shortlist — Jasmila Žbanić (director of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entry “Quo Vadis, Aida?”), Maite Alberdi (Chile’s “The Mole Agent”), Agnieszka Holland (Czech Republic’s “Charlatan”), Maria Sødahl (Norway’s “Hope”) and Kaouther Ben Hania (Tunisia’s “The Man Who Sold His Skin”) — have little obviously in common, ranging as they do from long-lauded veterans to a rising talent enjoying her first major international breakout. Their films run the gamut from hybrid documentary to semi-autobiographical fiction to wild, high-concept satire — bound by intense, often socially conscious empathy for the complicated subjects at hand, with little in the way of sentimentality. Sødahl’s film, her second feature and her first in a decade, is the most intimate and domestically focused of the five, though that approach still permits plenty of surprises. On the face of it, “Hope” sounds familiar, as it paints a pained, emotive portrait of a family splintering under the weight of a mother’s terminal cancer diagnosis. But this is no tearjerker in the “Terms of Endearment” mold. Sødahl’s story sidesteps expected movie tropes in large part because it’s inspired by her own: Her screenplay takes substantial inspiration from her recent experience of surviving cancer, while many of the blended family dynamics depicted in the film mirror her own. That gives the film an emotional conviction and clarity rare within its genre. The film’s point of view is not just personal but acutely feminine: its understanding of how the protagonist’s illness aects her differently as a wife, mother and career woman is precisely delineated. Norwegian helmer Sødahl points out that since there were 10 on the shortlist previously, proportionally there is no dierence. As for her film’s selection, she says: “It all has to do with which other films are up for the same year. We have shown it at TIFF and in Berlin where it has proved itself as a universal story, not because of cancer, but because of the way it treats family relations. It’s a story about life and the choices we make. I was not part of the jury, but maybe some of the other movies this year lacked universal qualities?” During Q&AS, she says, people ask a lot about the blended family issues, the modern family structure, and the taboos because “it’s historically a relatively new phenomena in society.” It’s indicative of “Hope’s” universal resonance that Nicole Kidman is developing a U.S. TV series based on the film,
The Balkans are still a very patriarchal society. We had years of great progress of women from 1945-1992. But since the war broke out in 1992, male violence dominated. ” --Jasmila Žbanić
though it’ll be a tall order to match Sødahl ‘s first-hand perspective behind the camera. Žbanić ‘s “Quo Vadis, Aida?” brings anguished personal investment and a clear-eyed feminist perspective to a story on a large canvas: the Srebrenica massacre, which saw more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims executed in summer 1995. Žbanić is close to her subject: at the time of the massacre, she was living under siege in Sarajevo, and she describes herself as having been haunted by Srebrenica ever since the full scale of the atrocity emerged. “The mirror is not guilty for showing an image,” she says. “I think these kind of films tell not only what happened in countries that are maybe far away from us, but they show truthful pictures of humans and what can we become.” Hers is the first film to address this still-contentious national shame, though she sensitively merges history with the fictional story of Aida (played by the remarkable Jasna Duricic), a female U.N. translator who is also a Srebrenica resident, and thus has rare access to multiple sides of the conflict — a position further complicated when her family members are endangered. The script resists blunt rhetoric, but deftly shows how Aida’s gender is held against her, as she fights for the lives of her husband and sons in