Innholdsfortegnelse for Award Special 37A, November 5, 2021 i The Hollywood Reporter

A head of the 93rd Academy Awards last April and despite the global pandemic, a record 97 countries submitted a film for the best international feature Oscar competition, and a record 93 were accepted into the race. For the 94th Oscars, the number of submitted films trickled down to 80, and the process of vetting those entries is still underway. But one thing is already certain: This year’s crop of hopefuls includes a bunch of edgy productions of the sort the Academy used to shy away from, but increasingly has embraced. What changed? For many years, the knock on the Academy’s foreign-language film committee (now known as its international feature film committee, which is composed of volunteers from across the organization’s branches) was that it was too conservative in its…

What began as a short internet video satirizing the furor that erupted over the removal of Confederate statues in New Orleans in 2015 became a bigger — and darker — story. “I’m interested in the absurd lengths people go to in order to avoid acknowledging the impact race has had — and still has — in this country,” says comedian-turned-filmmaker C.J. Hunt. “The monuments debate felt like a concrete way to explore a question at the heart of our divisions: Can we be honest about our nation’s past?” In revealing various groups’ century-plus-long campaign to legitimize the statues, says Hunt, “I hope our film helps people realize: Monuments are not history. Anyone with a couple hundred thousand dollars can buy a monument to commemorate whatever story they choose. And when…

If Holocaust survivor Misha Defonseca’s personal tale of escaping Nazi Germany as a child by being accepted into a protective pack of wolves — which she turned into a best-selling book — seems too astonishing to be true, here it’s put under a microscope that examines both its veracity and why people want to believe in it. “Misha and the Wolves is the story of a lie,” says filmmaker Sam Hobkinson. “When you make a documentary film about an untruth, you are inverting the form, turning it on its head. There is a fiction at the heart of your nonfiction film, and it releases a ton of formal and creative possibilities. I wanted to make a psychological thriller about belief, about how and why we believe the stories we are…

The dreamlike altered state of perception produced by Ethiopia’s stimulant leaf khat — for centuries the source of spiritual exploration and today the nation’s biggest cash crop — is reflected in filmmaker Jessica Beshir’s inventive depiction of the intimate stories of myriad people embedded in the khat trade. “The form of the film was inspired by the labyrinthic architecture of the walled city of Harar, which Sufi Imams believe is a true reflection of life on earth,” says Beshir of the film, whose title means “giving birth to wellness.” “Zigzagging through a labyrinth, we don’t really know what comes next, we wander into the unknown armed with our instinct as guide.… By ignoring barriers of time, we found a fluid form in which dreams, memories and desires are in direct…

57 DAYS This short centers on Julio Lumbreras, who was one of the first patients to enter the ICU in Spain with COVID-19. The film follows his 57 days in the ICU through his phone messages with his family. AGUILAS Directed by Kristy Guevara-Flanagan and Maite Zubiaurre, this documentary already has won awards at many festivals, including SXSW. It chronicles one of the searches along the border in Arizona, where an estimated one out of five missing migrants are found. AIN’T NO TIME FOR WOMEN On the eve of the presidential election in Tunis, a group of women gather at a hair salon as it transforms into a town square showcasing the country’s turmoil. This short was written and directed by Sarra El-Abed. AUDIBLE Directed by Matthew Ogens, Audible follows…

Rita Moreno is a living legend, best known for her performances in such movie musicals as 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, 1956’s The King and I and especially 1961’s West Side Story, for which she won the best supporting actress Academy Award, making her the first Latina Oscar winner. She also is one of just 16 people, and only 10 still alive, who have achieved EGOT status by winning at least one Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. Additionally, she was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, the National Medal of the Arts in 2009, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2013, the Kennedy Center Honor of Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award in 2015 and the Peabody Career Achievement Award in 2019. Now, more than 70…

In A24’s Lamb, Noomi Rapace’s most memorable co-star is a half-human, half-sheep newborn named Ada. As Maria, who runs a farm with her husband (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason) in remote Iceland, Rapace weathered a logistically complicated shoot that included actual nightmares. The resulting film, helmed by first-time director Valdimar Jóhannsson, who co-wrote it with frequent Björk collaborator Sjón, is an eerie, intermittently funny slice of folk horror. Rapace and Jóhannsson spoke to THR about how they made the movie and why they resist the temptation to classify it as a genre film. Maria is a heavy character. She’s been through a lot of anguish, and she’s desperate to be a parent. NOOMI RAPACE It’s brutal to open up yourself for the emotions of losing a child. When Valdimar and his producer…

ROMANIA BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN In a year of WTF contenders, Radu Jude’s entry for Romania is arguably the weirdest. Part Borat-style documentary, part film essay and part morality play, the Berlin winner goes for broke (it opens with a hard-core sex tape and closes with a deranged orgy) in a scathing social satire centered on a schoolteacher who has been publicly shamed. KOSOVO HIVE 2021 Oscar nominee Quo Vadis, Aida? focused on the Srebrenica massacre, one of the most horrific moments of the Yugoslav War. Blerta Basholli’s surprise Sundance Grand Jury, audience and directing awards winner centers on the aftermath of the neighboring conflict in Kosovo and on a war widow forced by economic necessity to leave the house and find a job. MALTA LUZZU Jesmark Scicluna,…

While the trailblazing work of choreographer Alvin Ailey has been duly celebrated, Ailey himself has been less explored. Filmmaker Jamila Wignot has been a fan since college, “but I didn’t know very much about the man behind the company’s dance works or vision,” she says. “The film was an incredible opportunity to immerse myself in Ailey’s story of becoming — to live in his skin and hopefully channel the memories, experiences, drive and vision that animate his work.” Audio recorded during the final year of his life makes Ailey very present as, in essence, the film’s narrator. “He sacrificed, he says, everything. We weren’t interested in presenting that as an ode to martyrdom but rather as a reminder of the context in which he was creating his work and to…

In chronicling the journeys of three American teenage girls adopted from China who discover that they’re biological cousins and embark on paths of personal discovery, filmmaker Amanda Lipitz says she and her team “tried to create three distinct portraits of young women growing up in the world today. We loved their ‘teenageness’ and the truth of not knowing all the answers at that age. They are still working to figure out who they are.” As the girls uncover the stories that set their lives in motion, Lipitz says their shared experiences are ultimately about “the family that you find along the way. It takes a lot of courage to search for one’s lost history, and if you are lucky enough to be witness to that journey — as I was…

Directors Isabel Bethencourt and Parker Hill admit that, in following three typical teenage girls into their summer party circuit, they didn’t expect to discover such a degree of frank talk about the often-harrowing sexual experiences the girls and their peers contend with. “We didn’t set out to make a movie about sexual assault, but in wanting to make a movie about girlhood, we realized that trauma is an inherent part of that experience,” the directors explain, noting that they strove to balance the darker themes with breezier facets of teen life. “That’s exactly what it feels like to be a girl growing up. One second you’re opening up to your friends about something that you’re dealing with, the other you’re laughing and going to McDonald’s. We wanted to show all…

In two documentaries that are early contenders in this year’s Oscar race, the films’ subjects relive painful experiences. In Nat Geo’s The Rescue, the divers who saved 12 kids and their 25-year-old coach from a flooding cave return to re-create the experience in order to show audiences what it was like in those dark caves, while in Netflix’s Procession, sexual abuse survivors storyboard their memories to face their trauma and find peace. The Rescue directors Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, whose Free Solo won the 2019 Oscar for best documentary feature, weren’t in Thailand in 2018 when the Tham Luang cave rescue happened, and there was no known footage except for one or two clips — so immediately, they knew they’d be facing a challenge to visually portray the rescue…

It’s thanks to Italian neorealist director Vittorio De Sica — the genius behind such films as 1948’s The Bicycle Thief and 1970’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis — that the Academy Awards has a best international film category. That’s because his 1946 film Shoeshine (or in Italian, Sciuscià, the Neapolitan pronunciation of the English word) was awarded a special foreign-language Oscar in 1948. (De Sica won again in 1950 for Bicycle Thief. But it wasn’t until 1956 that the category, then known as best foreign-language film, became competitive, with multiple nominees; after that, he won in 1965 for Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and in 1972 for Finzi-Continis.) Honing motifs he’d later explore in Bicycle Thief, De Sica mined great drama and pathos in Shoeshine by chronicling the difficult lives of…

Describing the visual language of Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground for Apple TV+, Haynes’ longtime cinematographer Edward Lachman contends that the director “found the visual metaphor for the art, the counterculture” of the New York underground during the ’60s. This feature-length look at the influential band is a collage of archival material, including Andy Warhol’s silent video shorts known as Screen Tests of such band members as Lou Reed and John Cale. The historical content is presented in the split-screen style of his 1966 film Chelsea Girls, and is deftly combined with new interviews — including with band members Cale and Moe Tucker — all lensed by Lachman with echoes of Warhol’s style. “Because of the limited material that existed from the time that they were putting out records,…

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN Moreno got an early break in the beloved 1952 MGM musical that starred Gene Kelly (who co-directed with Stanley Donen), Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor. She played Zelda Zanders — “the Zip Girl” — in a comic departure from the “island girl” role in which she had been typecast. THE KING AND I In the 1956 big-screen adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, Moreno portrayed Tuptim, a slave brought from Burma to be a wife to the King of Siam but who is secretly in love with another man. She later expressed regret about being cast in the role of an Asian character. WEST SIDE STORY Moreno won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her work in this 1961 musical retelling of Romeo &…

The Attica Prison Riot of 1971 was the bloodiest prison revolt in U.S. history. Prisoners demanding better living conditions took control of the complex, and after four days of negotiations, state police regained control of the prison, resulting in 43 people dead — 33 of them prisoners, while the other 10 were correctional officers or civilian employees. Filmmakers Stanley Nelson and Traci Curry’s documentary Attica depicts the violent revolt and sheds light on how it sparked the prisoners’ rights movement and the need for ongoing reform in U.S. prisons. Nelson and former Attica inmate Arthur Harrison, who appears in the film, spoke to THR about the process of getting Attica made and why 2021 — 50 years after the riot — was the right year to release the documentary. What…

This is the tragedy,” Laurence Olivier intones over the opening credits to his 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet, “of a man who could not make up his mind.” The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier’s contender (and, if you believe some handicappers, frontrunner) for the 2022 international film Oscar, is as much comedy as it is tragedy. It’s about a woman, not a man. And it’s set in Norway, not a few nations over in Hamlet’s Denmark. But indecision, and how inaction as much as action can shape one’s fate, runs through both tales. Renate Reinsve stars as Julie, an almost-30 woman who still hasn’t figured out what she wants to do with her life. She studied medicine, then dropped it for photography. Now she works in a bookshop.…

“By employing a character-driven, cinema-vérité approach, our aim was to use distinct storylines of our characters as a microcosm through which we all can view the emotional and societal impact of the pandemic,” says filmmaker Matthew Heineman of his visceral up-close and urgent look at the confusing, confounding early days of the COVID-19 outbreak in New York’s overburdened hospitals. “It was jarring to witness what was going on in the hospital day in and day out, only to hear about people denying COVID, calling it a hoax, refusing to wear masks, and now refusing to get vaccinated. I feel like it was my job to put people in the shoes of those who lived it on the front lines and to create a historical document of this time. In a…

“The opportunity to use my background in fiction in order to delve into the world of nonfiction turned this into a real passion project for me,” says filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios, who used a unique hybrid narrative approach to documenting the real-world challenges facing two Mexico City police officers — romantic partners as well as on the streets — as they contend with rampant crime and internal corruption. “There is a huge lack of understanding on behalf of citizens regarding how we all participate in the impunity crisis,” Ruizpalacios says. “I want to contribute to change our relationship with the police and break the prejudices that remain deeply rooted in citizens’ perception of the police. I hope that this film becomes a catalyst for generating a larger conversation around our relationship…

“Our story of two Afro-Cuban virtuosos who love their own countries, love each other’s countries, and love each other, adds a level of nuance rarely seen in news or documentary reporting on Cuba,” say filmmakers Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider of the tale of two long-separated brothers — one living in the U.S., one living in Cuba — reuniting, however fleetingly, to create beautiful music. “Aldo and Ilmar have remained connected as much as possible but never had the chance to record music together or work seriously on composing and arranging Aldo’s original work,” the directors note of the joyous results of their collaborations. “We saw very clearly the benefits of tearing down rather than erecting walls and understood that where politicians fail, artists can succeed.”…