One of the meanings of each year's Oscars season is to look back at the important works of the past year that cannot be overlooked.
At first glance, this year's Oscar shortlist has the impression that the proportion of works by female directors is low.
Of the nine works nominated for Best Picture, only "Women's Talk" was written by Canadian choreographer and director Sarah Polly.
The finalists for Best Director were none of the women.
Remember that last year's best film "Listening Girl" and best director "Dog Power" were both written by female directors, is it because the works of female directors this year are not high-quality enough?
Not really. In the initial shortlist of the Directors Guild Awards of America, although the finalists for "Best Director of a Feature Film" were all men, four of the five finalists for "Best Director of a First Feature Film" were women.
Their work is even more evenly matched.
For example, "Happening" is the Golden Lion Award at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, "San Omer" is the Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, and "Moray Eel" is the Golden Camera Award at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, which was finally won by "After-Sun Holiday", which was shortlisted for the 2022 Cannes Film Festival Golden Camera Award and has a good reputation.
In addition, female directorial works such as "She Said" and "The Girl in the Depths of the Swamp", although they did not attract attention during the awards season, were also very topical when they were released.
Therefore, Mr. Bo hereby combines the six female director works with their own characteristics in 2022 into the following three axes:
Stunning debut, women's struggle, women and crime.
Some of them appeared in this year's Oscar shortlist, and some of them sparked heated discussions because of the importance of the topic or the high box office.
After-sun holiday
Douban score: 8.1
"After-Sun Holiday" is a much-discussed women's debut this awards season.
Screenwriter and director Charlotte Wells not only won the Directors Guild of America Award for "Best Director of First Feature Film" for the film, but also won the "Outstanding Screenwriter, Director, and Producer Debut" at the British Academy Film Awards, and as early as last year's Cannes International Film Critics Week, she was praised for winning the "French Cultural and Creative Association's Choice Award".
As a private film with the theme of an 11-year-old daughter and her father spending a short vacation together, the story of "After the Holiday" is not complicated, compared to just a "saliva" narrative movie.
But it is recognized as skillful and full of stamina.
The bright summer of childhood has both the warm moments spent with her father from the perspective of a young girl, and the melancholy colors that can only be seen when looking back as an adult.
Memory exists between reality and imagination, so it is most suitable as a movie material, and the memory of Yoshimitsu Katayu is very light and heavy, very cute and actually very sad, just like the look and feel of this movie.
Director Charlotte Wells once said in an interview that she was inspired by the family photo album, and when she gazed at the photo holding her young father, she felt "time stretch back and forth at both ends".
That's what makes After-Sun Holiday amazing: stitching time and space.
The heroine Sophie looks back at the journey in her memory through the videotape, and the bright and sad are gazed at gazing gazing at them gently.
At that time, my father said to her, "Once you leave where you grew up, you don't belong there completely." "Many words can only be empathized when they grow up, but they can't go back to the relative after-holiday that father and daughter once had.
It is worth mentioning that although the actor of the film, Paul Mesca, is not too competitive in this year's competition for the Oscar actor, his interpretation of the father in the film is quite in place.
Women's conversations
Douban score: 7.1
"Women's Talk" was nominated for this year's Oscars for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Canadian all-round director Sarah Polly adapted the best-selling original work of the famous Canadian novelist Miriam Tefus this time.
Although the film is set in a colonial village in 2010, it is more like a story of "women being sexually assaulted" anywhere with an overhead background.
When a woman realizes that she has been violated, there are three paths ahead: do nothing, stay and resist, or leave.
These are three options women face when they encounter real-world difficulties.
Much of the film is devoted to the lengthy debates within the women's community and how they reach a consensus to leave after confrontations and confrontations.
The large dialogue may make some viewers feel uncomfortable, and even question whether these "illiterate" women can argue in rigorous language.
But in fact, this is a work that shows the attitude that all women must participate in the dialogue, and the patriarchal world should "listen" to women's thinking.
Sexual violence is not shown in the film, and the debate between women quickly escalates from concrete atrocities to philosophical structural issues.
They share common beliefs but are full of differences of opinion, but after difficult negotiations and negotiations, they both decide to "leave" the colony.
This image of "women's solidarity" without prejudice has its own inspiring side today.
Leaving is not escape, but the starting point of women's awakening and resistance, and the ending sentence "Your story will be different" is enough to move all female audiences.
She said
Douban score: 7.8
"She Said" directed by German female director Maria Schrader, although it was selected as the American Film Institute's top ten films in 2022, it was not favored by the Oscar.
However, the film's topicality in theaters last year far exceeded "Women's Conversation".
In late 2017, the New York Times published an investigative story written by two female journalists on the front page exposing the sexual abuse of women by Hollywood producer Weinstein since the 1990s.
After the report was published, a number of Hollywood A-list actresses came forward to accuse Weinstein.
"She Said" is about how this story that ignited the feminist movement was born with difficulty.
The film's power comes from two levels: the power of investigative reporting and the power of women.
The significance of investigative reporting is to counter the "evil of the structure of accomplices in sexual assault" by verifying the report.
But the process is not as exciting as it sounds, but it will hit walls everywhere.
The most affected in the "Weinstein Affair" were not the female stars at the top of the entertainment industry, but the production assistants and female employees who worked for him.
Two female journalists used this as an investigative starting point to find women who were not seen and had no power.
The truth telling process is very difficult. It was the determination and courage of so many women that stacked up with evidence that brought down Weinstein and empowered the feminist movement to help more women around the world.
The completion of "their" resistance to the system written by "her" is the female mutual support shown in "She Said".
All beauty with blood and tears
Douban score: 7.9
"All Beauty and Blood and Tears", which won the Golden Lion Award at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, was also shortlisted for this year's Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film.
American photographic artist Nan Godin is the originator of "private photography", as well as an activist and social activist.
Her life is full of contradictions and tensions, and Laura Petras completes the narrative in a two-line interweaving of "people" and "events": both to show Nan Godin's growth trajectory and to focus on her fight against the Sackler family, a pharmaceutical company.
Although there is no lack of film critics who believe that these two clues are quite separate, the spirit of "resistance" practiced by Nan Godin is exactly consistent.
She defies all mainstream social frameworks (anti-AIDS discrimination, pro-sexual minorities) and is not afraid to confront the big chautocrats, and her artistic career echoes her social activism, so it can also be seen as a lifelong struggle from the artist's life.
However, because Nan Godin's personal upbringing brings to life the history of queer culture and art in New York, her part of calling on the weak to fight powerful pharmaceutical companies seems decent.
As a short Douban review said: "The private part is very moving, the public part is too public." ”
My personal impression after watching the film is that Nan Godin's life is too legendary.
Probably only a director like Laura Petras who can completely hand over the power of the narrative to the subject has the ability to control.
Saint-Omer
Douban score: 6.9
Although "Saint Omer" did not win in the North American awards season, it not only won the Grand Jury Prize at last year's Venice Film Festival, but director Alice Diop also won the Emerging Director Award (Future Lion Award).
At the beginning of this year, the film just won the "Best Debut" at the French César Film Awards.
This is actually a work about "intergenerational trauma" between mother and daughter.
If "Instantaneous Universe" is to achieve mother-daughter reconciliation in a fantastical way, then the film is to let the heroine examine her own trauma through the trial of a case in which a mother killed her daughter.
Why would a young mother kill her 15 month old daughter?
The case skillfully blends structural issues such as racial prejudice against African immigrants in France and the stigmatization of women in the social system.
The trial drama in the fixed camera is calm and restrained, and the emotional energy is pushed forward layer by layer, and the defendant calmly recounts his contractions and breastfeeding experiences, the absence of men, and even poetic about leaving the baby on the beach.
The highlight of the film is the final defense lawyer's heart-pounding monologue.
She not only tells the isolation of the defendant when he becomes an "invisible woman", tells the common plight of women who are always regarded as monsters, but also heals the heroine in the gallery in a strange way: mother and child are connected by inseparable "chimeric cells", and all mothers and daughters will always carry traces of each other.
Girl in the depths of the swamp
Douban score: 7.5
"The Girl in the Swamp" directed by Olivia Newman is adapted from the best-selling novel "Where the Clams Sing" that sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.
The film's global box office revenue exceeded $140 million, but its reputation was quite polar, with a Rotten Tomatoes popcorn index of 96% and a "freshness" of only 34%. The generally bad reviews of professionals also prevented the film from entering the awards season.
But if you only regard the film as a sweet female growth story, there is still something to be seen.
Newman's film debuts, "Preliminary Round" and "The Girl in the Swamp", although different in subject matter, both deal with the problem of "girls growing up and surviving in harsh environments". Women who grew up deep in the swamp and were not "domesticated" also followed the laws of nature in their way of saving themselves.
Compared with "Saint Omer", the trial scene of "The Girl in the Depths of the Swamp" was obviously not restrained enough, fully mobilizing the audience's empathy for the heroine.
Women have to survive against all odds in their lives, so swamps and wetlands do not consider death a sin.
At least, the film shows a way for women to protect themselves in a paradise opposite to the civilized world.
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