International Directors Creative Inspiration Oscar Contenders Palm Springs Film Festival These events change your life

Jacques Audiard’s musical in Spanish Emilia Perez It could be the favorite to win the Best International Film Competition at the upcoming Academy Awards.

But that didn’t stop a group of emerging and established directors from around the world from gathering at the Palm Springs Festival Show to woo Academy voters by touting their bold stories and independent film achievements. Many filmmakers have brought films that pay homage to their past, as is the case with Walter Sallis’s film. I’m still herein which Golden Globe winner Fernanda Torres plays a mother of five whose family is torn apart when the father disappears under Brazil’s military dictatorship.

Salles told a panel of Oscar-winning international filmmakers in Palm Springs that he based his family drama on a book written by a childhood friend, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, whose family and home he frequently visited and who played a pivotal role in his coming of age. -Age 13 years old.

“There was a sense of immediacy in that house, in that other country, so different from the Brazilian streets in a country under curfew. “I later understood that intensity of life, that it was a form of resistance for a family that had to live under a military dictatorship,” Salles said during a panel discussion at the festival moderated by Mia Galuppo, a film writer at UCLA. Hollywood Reporter. Sallis then remembered that the father of the family had been taken from their home for questioning, never to be seen again.

“That somehow defined the before and after of that family, and everyone’s lives, and that was the starting point for the movie,” he said of the father’s disappearance.

Italian director Maura Delpiero spoke about her family – specifically her father’s death and having a child – which inspired her. cinnabara historical drama, and Italy’s Oscar pick, set in a remote mountain village where the arrival of a refugee soldier disrupts everyone’s lives.

During a session moderated by Kevin Cassidy, International News Editor at THRDelPierro said she never wanted to base a film on her family until the shift occurred in her mind. “It’s those events that change your life, becoming an orphan and a mother. I felt like I had to go back to the roots before moving forward.

By Mati Diop, whose documentary Dahomey Senegal will compete in both the Oscars for Best Documentary Feature and the Best International Narrative Competitions, and its bold storytelling move came in part by picking up on the issue of looted artifacts from Africa by giving the inanimate treasures in its film their own voiceovers, meaning… Implicitly it is. Not just objects, but living entities with real cultural meaning and power.

Dahomey It follows the return to the Republic of Benin of 26 African royal artifacts, which were plundered by France from the Kingdom of Dahomey. “The sound you hear in the film carries generations of people, objects, and artifacts, and I wanted the audience of African descent to recognize themselves as I recognized myself in the journey of these artifacts, their displacement and exile.” Diop explained.

For the exiled Iranian director and Cannes Special Prize winner Mohammad Roussilov, who entered three women in his Oscar competition for Germany, Holy fig seedIt was not an easy job as he had long faced Iran’s notorious film censorship laws when producing films in Iran.

“Initially, 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 one could not create a real, believable woman in cinema,” Rasoulof told Palm. Plate springs through a translator.

“As a filmmaker, I couldn’t show women in their private spaces at home with their hair showing. I could not show them in their moments of loneliness with the simple truths in which they were. There has always been a hand or force manipulating reality. He added: “This is what determined my path as a director.”

But Rousslov said that his latest film, about the life of an investigative judge working in an authoritarian regime, includes three women: his wife, played by actress and activist Soheila Golestani, and his young daughters (Setareh Maleki and Mahsa Rostami). Rousslov, who was arrested and imprisoned in Iran because of his films before establishing a new life in Germany, said that the depiction of women in… Holy fig seed Represents “resistance against censorship.”

The Palm Springs festival episodes also looked at Iranian films in a more comedic light, as Canadian director Matthew Rankin discussed Universal languageentering Canada and the cultural mix where Persian and French are the official languages ​​of Canada, and the local Tim Hortons serves delicious Persian dishes.

To find non-professional child actors for his film, Rankin recounted that he placed a casting notice for Persian-speaking children at a local school in Montreal. “It was just about anyone who was interested in being in a film, no experience needed, come and see it,” he recalls. “And many, many kids came. “We met three very precocious kids who had very strong personalities, and they had a sense of the ridiculous and the absurd, and we ended up By rewriting the script for them.

How did the children perform in their on-screen roles? “They were real professionals, they were amazing. I’m also acting in the movie, I’m not a professional like those kids. They were just tough,” Rankin insisted.