2022 Oscar Watch: Breakthrough Women Directors Considered for Best International Feature Film

If the Academy Awards are the Olympics of filmmaking, then no Oscar category better represents global participation than that of Best International Feature Film. Every year, at least 90 countries each choose a film to represent the country for nomination consideration in this category. Women are still a small minority of directors whose movies are selected to represent each nation, but in recent years, some women directors have been breaking through, and many of their movies have a distinctly female point of view. In many cases, their movies have won awards at major film festivals.

Kamila Andini’s Yuni (Indonesia), Blerta Basholli’s Hive (Kosovo), Julia Ducournau’s Titane (France), Gessica Généus’ Freda (Haiti), Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola (Costa Rica), and Barbara Schrader’s I’m Your Man (Germany) are among the prominent woman-directed movies that are the official selections of their respective countries for the Best International Feature Film category of the 94th annual Academy Awards, which will be presented in Los Angeles on March 27, 2022. Hive,I’m Your Man, Tatiana Huezo’s Prayers for the Stolen (Mexico), and Laura Wandel’s Playground (Belgium) made the Oscar shortlist. Nominations will be announced on February 28.

What do all of these movies have in common, besides being written and directed by women? They all have strong female protagonists at the center of the story. Considering that in many countries, being a woman filmmaker is seen as unusual or even suspect, these breakthrough films often represent an extra measure of achievement in societies where women are discouraged from pursuing male-dominated professions.

Of the 93 movies submitted for consideration in the Best International Feature Film category for the 94th Academy Awards, 21 (or 23%) are directed or co-directed by women. To be eligible for this category, each film representing a country must have production funding in the country it represents and in the calendar year prior to the Academy Awards ceremony, the movie must be released for at least one week in a commercial theater in that nation.

Having just 23% of the movies directed by women represents a noticeable decline from the selections of the previous two years. For the 93rd annual Academy Awards, held in 2021, if the 97 films submitted consideration to be nominated for Best International Feature Film, 31 (or 32%) were directed or co-directed by women. For the 92nd annual Academy Awards, held in 2020, that number was 28 out of 94 (or 30%).

Representation might fluctuate for women directors in this Oscar category, but Hive director Basholli believes opportunities for women directors in her native Kosovo have been improving. Hive is the feature-film directorial debut of Basholli, who tells Women’s Media Center: “There’s a lot of women filmmakers here [in Kosovo]. We get public funding from Kosovo Cinematography Center. There’s no specific [public] funding for female filmmakers. The competition is equal for everybody. We win because our projects are good, not because we are female or women.”

Basholli adds, “The good thing about it is that there’s a lot of young women filmmakers, and their films are succeeding in big festivals. That’s really an amazing feeling. There’s a really good sense of community, and there’s a really good feeling to be a woman filmmaker here.”

Hive had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, Directing Award, and Audience Award in the festival’s World Cinema section. The dramatic film, which takes place in the 2000s, is based on the true story of Fahrije Hoti (played by Yllka Gashi), a Kosovo war widow and mother, who starts her own condiment business with other women who are also war widows. She faces scorn and opposition in a community where it’s considered radical and even shameful for women to drive automobiles or become entrepreneurs.

“It is a real challenge to make a film about a person who is still alive,” says Basholli. “It was a lot of pressure. A lot of times, I was very scared. A lot of times, I was thinking, ‘What if she doesn’t like the film?’ I made the decision to focus on how she started the business and how it started to succeed, in order to give hope to people and encourage them to continue no matter what, in the way that she inspired me … I wanted to honor her.”

Titane, Freda, Playground, Prayers for the Stolen, and Clara Sola had their world premieres at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where Titane won the festival’s top prize: the Palme d’Or. It was only the second time since the festival launched in 1946 that a woman-directed movie won this award. (Jane Campion was the first woman director to win the Palme d’Or, which she did for 1993’s The Piano.) Titane also won the People's Choice Midnight Madness Award (for horror, sci-fi, or unconventional genre movies) at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, Playground won the FIPRESCI Prize, while Prayers for the Stolenwon the Special Prize.

I’m Your Man had its world premiere at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival, where the film’s co-star Maren Eggert won the Best Actress prize. The comedy/drama — about a female scientist who reluctantly agrees to test a male robot (played by Dan Stevens) that was built to be a love companion — has since gone on to win four prizes at the German Film Awards: Outstanding Feature Film, Best Direction, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress.

After its world premiere at TIFF in 2021, Yuni won TIFF’s Platform Prize, which is given to a movie with “high artistic merit and strong directorial vision.” In the dramatic film, Arawinda Kirana portrays a native Indonesian girl named Yuni, who is about to turn 17. She’s being pressured to get married, but she wants to go to college instead, even though many people around Yuni constantly dismiss and discourage what she wants.

Yuni director Andini comments to Women’s Media Center about winning the 2021 TIFF Platform Prize: “Winning the prize is sort of like a sign that tells you that you are in your path. It gave you a signal and energy to keep on going. It’s like a waterfall you find to be able to reward yourself for the journey. But then, you have to leave it at some point to continue the journey.”

Sometimes, an international movie is so impressive to well-known Hollywood filmmakers that they sign on as executive producers after the film has already been selected for consideration to be nominated for an Oscar. That’s what happened to Hive in December 2021, when Emmy-winning actress Elisabeth Moss and her business partner Lindsey McManus at Love & Squalor Pictures joined the Hive team as executive producers. In the same month, Oscar-winning filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola became an executive producer of Freda. He plans to campaign for Freda to get awards.

Basholli and Andini both say that they were lucky to come from families who encouraged their dreams to become a filmmaker. “I was born in the world of cinema,” Andini says. “My father is a filmmaker. But I never wanted to be one when I was a kid. I love art in general … I started learning film when I was in high school [when] the digital era arrived.”

Basholli, who enrolled in film school in Kosovo when she was 18, says: “Of course, there were comments like, ‘This is a hard job for women.’ But because I was the youngest in the family, my father was happy that somebody [in the family] went to art school, because he loved photography … But I always joke that because I’m the last child, and [my parents] have a doctor, they have a pharmacist, they have an engineer, the last [child] can be an artist. I don’t think anybody tried to discourage me.”

Basholli continued her film studies as a graduate student at New York University. She says that the biggest differences between filmmaking in Kosovo and in the United States are that in Kosovo, most filmmakers get public funding, and they have fewer restrictions placed on them, in terms of permits and insurance, but they also have less access to equipment resources. “We had a lot of family members help each other,” Basholli says of her experiences starting out as a filmmaker in Kosovo. “There were much smaller crews. It was a much more ‘guerilla’ kind of shooting.”

Even coming from a supportive family cannot shield women filmmakers from sexism. Andini recalls this incident: “Once I [was on] a panel of young filmmakers. The moderator asked the other [male] filmmakers about their struggles starting up, and she asked me if my film is only an accident. Since the beginning, I knew that I will have to work twice as hard as others.”

Basholli and Andini both say that they feel honored that their movies were chosen to represent their respective countries at the Academy Awards, and they hope this representation will give people cinematic perspectives of how women live in their countries’ cultures. “But at the same time, I feel that now there is another mountain to climb,” Andini says, citing other challenges of being a woman filmmaker in Indonesia.

Both filmmakers say that they will never compromise on their visions for presenting a strong female perspective in their movies. I want to tell the truth,” Andini says. “We need to find partners, crew, and cast that allows this as well. I have to find everyone that is brave, and it’s not easy.” Her next movie is Before, Now and Then, which she describes as a “story about marriage during the 1960s in Indonesia.”

Andini comments on what filmmaking is like for women in Indonesia: “Indonesia's film industry is actually very open to female filmmakers, since we have female names throughout our history of cinema. The industry is still developing; we don't even have grants or funding in general for any filmmakers. One of the hardest things about being female filmmakers in Indonesia mostly is about how you struggle with the other roles you have … Our society is very communal, so being a female, there are certain duties you have to do for the communities too.”

As for what she would like to see improve about filmmaking in Indonesia and other parts of the world, Andini says: “I want film locations that are friendly for babies and kids. I want every filmmaker to bring their kids to location and not have to feel guilty for it. I want many female filmmakers to not have to choose to be in film or to be a housewife (unless that is what they want to do), because they could do both.”

Basholli comments on her personal vision of the movies that she wants to make: “I would never want to portray a woman as a hopeless victim. That is something I can’t compromise. Those kinds of stories, I don’t think anyone will learn anything from them.”

Basholli also says that because movies have the power to inspire people, “I think we really need to portray strong women characters. And even if they’re victims, we have to find a way of giving hope that you can always get out of a situation that put you in as a victim. You shouldn’t see yourself as a victim.”