‘Images are a language’: Best International Feature Oscar nominees on how their films ‘transcend culture’
“My goal is to create an experience. Music is closer to filmmaking than any other art. It transcends culture. Filmmaking is a language in itself. Images are a language, they are not foreign,” states Gints Zilbalodis, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker whose Flow is up for Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature at Oscars. He joined an international directors panel at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival with three other auteurs whose films are nominated in the international race: Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Mohammad Rasoulof (The Seed of the Sacred Fig), and Walter Salles (I’m Still Here). It was moderated by Roger Durling.
On Flow, Zilbalodis “didn’t want the camerawork to feel constructed but rather based in discovery. I’m not interested in manufacturing emotion,” and Salles had a similar approach to his real-life heroine Eunice Paiva in I’m Still Here, who is “inspiring” for how she “can confront this authoritarian state [under Brazil’s military dictatorship]” but “refused to be seen as the victim.” But in telling her story, the filmmaker “would never embrace melodrama for the sake of theatricality. I would never betray her story. Trust the spectator. The film embraces the fact that we can overcome.”
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Like I’m Still Here, Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig is about how the pressure of authoritarianism can send shock waves through a family. “When you live in a system of repression and dictatorship then being yourself becomes a challenge,” he explained about making his film in secret in Iran. “When I started making films the first question I had was: how do I maintain being myself? I used metaphors to express myself. After my third film, I realized that metaphors in itself were a form of censorship.” Because of that national censorship, “I had to turn limitations into solutions. The story began when I was in prison and one of the officers told me he questioned his life and his job. This story and this chasm highlights the issue between tradition and identity.”
In its own way, Audiard’s audacious crime musical Emilia Pérez is also about surviving a deadly regime, but you might be surprised by one of his influences: “I have this nostalgia for silent film,” he revealed, “films where there is purely acting and light. What I mean is that I try to escape from spoken dialogue.” And yet he has made multiple films now that not only incorporate dialogue, but dialogue in languages he doesn’t speak, including Arabic in A Prophet, Tamil in Dheepan, and now Spanish in Emilia Pérez. “One could attribute that to my natural masochism,” Audiard suggests. But really he’s drawn to “the musicality of languages. On set I started to lose interest in the actual meaning and become drawn to the music and the song of the dialogue.” And in Emilia Pérez, the dialogue literally sings.
The 2025 Academy Awards will be presented March 2.
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