Global Directors Talk Creative Inspiration for Oscar Contenders at Palm Springs Fest: “It’s Those Events That Change Your Life”
Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical Emilia Peréz may be the heavy favorite to win the best international film competition at the upcoming Academy Awards.
But that didn’t stop a host of emerging and established directors from around the world gathering at the Palm Springs Festival Festival to win over Academy voters by touting their audacious storytelling and indie film feats. Many of the filmmakers brought movies that reckon with their past, as with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, in which Golden Globe winner Fernanda Torres plays a mother of five children whose family is torn apart when the father goes missing under Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Salles told one of two Oscar best international filmmaker panels at Palm Springs that he based his family drama on a book written by a childhood friend, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, whose family and home he often visited and which played a pivotal part in his own coming-of-age at 13 years old.
“There was a sense of immediacy in that house, in that other country, which differed completely from the Brazilian streets in a country under curfew. That intensity of life, I later understood it was a form of resistance of a family that had to live under a military dictatorship,” Salles said during a festival panel moderated by Mia Galuppo, a film writer at The Hollywood Reporter. Then Salles recalled the family’s father being seized from their home for an interrogation, never to be seen again.
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“That somehow defined the before and after for that family, for everyone’s lives, and that was the starting point of the film,” he said of the father’s disappearance.
Italian filmmaker Maura Delpero talked about her own family — and specifically the death of her father and giving birth to a child — providing the inspiration for Vermiglio, a period drama, and Italy’s Oscars selection, that is set in a remote mountain village where the arrival of a refugee soldier disrupts everyone’s lives.
During a panel moderated by Kevin Cassidy, international news editor at THR, Delpero said she hadn’t ever wanted to base a movie on her family, until that paradigm shift in her mind. “It’s those events that change your life, becoming an orphan and a mother. And I felt I had to go back to the origins before going forth,” she remembered.
For Mati Diop, whose documentary Dahomey will vie for Senegal in both the Oscar best documentary and best international feature competitions, her bold storytelling move in part came by capturing the issue of looted artifacts from Africa by literally giving the inanimate treasures in her film their own voice-overs, implying they are not mere objects, but living entities with real cultural meaning and force.
Dahomey follows the return to the Republic of Benin of 26 royal African artifacts looted by France from the Kingdom of Dahomey. “The voice you hear in the film carries generations of people, of objects, of artifacts, and I wanted an Afro-descendant audience to recognize themselves as I did recognize myself in the journey of these artifacts, of their displacements and their exiles,” Diop explained.
For Cannes special prize winner and exiled Iranian director Mohammed Rouselof, inserting a trio of women into his Oscar contender for Germany, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, was no easy feat as he had long come up against Iran’s notorious film censorship laws when making movies in Iran.
“In the beginning, the censorship in my country, Iran, was such that one could either tell the story of women by omitting very simple facts about their lives, or you could not create a believable real woman in cinema,” Rasoulof told the Palm Springs panel through a translator.
“As a filmmaker, I could not show women in their private spaces at home with their hair showing. I could not show them in their own lonely moments with the simple realities in which they were. There was always a hand or a power that sort of manipulated the reality. That’s what determined my path as a filmmaker,” he added.
But Rouselof said his latest film, about life for an investigating judge working in an authoritarian regime, includes a trio of women — his wife, played by actress and activist Soheila Golestani, and young daughters (Setareh Maleki and Mahsa Rostami). Rouselof, who had been arrested and imprisoned in Iran for his movies before establishing a new life in Germany, said portraying women in The Seed of a Sacred Fig represented “resistance against censorship.”
The Palm Springs festival panels also addressed Iranian films in a more comedic light as Canadian director Matthew Rankin discussed Universal Language, Canada’s entry and a cultural mash-up where Persian and French are the official languages of Canada, and a local Tim Hortons serves Persian delicacies.
To find non-professional child actors for his film, Rankin recounted putting up a casting notice for Farsi-speaking children in a local Montreal school. “It was just anyone interested in being in a movie, no experience required, come, check it out. And many, many kids came. And we met three very precocious children with very strong personalities, and they had a sense of irony and the absurd, and we ended up rewriting the script for them,” he recalled.
How did the children perform in roles on screen? “They were real pros, just amazing. I also act in the film, and I’m not nearly as professional as these kids. They were just badass,” Rankin insisted.
