Sixteen movies submitted in the Non-English Language Film category for Golden Globe consideration are directed by women — 30% of the submissions. All their stories deal with profound issues.

Herstory from Palestine

Cherien Dabis’s film All that is Left of You represents Jordan, but is a Palestinian origin story. It follows a fictive family, who live in Java in 1948, to the present and it tells the heart-wrenching story of how a family’s displacement from their land has affected their existence.

“I grew up as a Palestinian in the diaspora in the U.S.,” explains Cherien Dabis, who also produced, wrote and stars in the film. “I grew up with a keen awareness that people didn’t know the story. No one really knows the story of what happened in 1948 from the Palestinian perspective and how Palestinians suffered. I always wondered why the world did not know that.”

She had heard the stories many times herself. Her own father became a refugee in 1967, when Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine, and she wanted to honor him and his legacy by telling a story similar to his.

“I chose to go back to 1948 because in some ways, it’s the origin wound. It’s the first massive expulsion. You have to know about this in order to really understand what’s happening today.”

The film opens in the late ’80s. We see the teenage boy Noor, played by Muhammad Abed Elrahman, run through the occupied West Bank when the Israeli soldiers open fire. He is shot. Then we cut to Noor’s mother Hanan (played by Dabis), who talks directly to the camera: “You don’t know very much about us. It’s OK, I’m not here to blame you, I’m here to tell you who is my son. But for you to understand, I must tell you what happened to his grandfather.” We are then taken back in time to Hanan’s family’s destiny in Java.

“Palestinians have been so politicized that at this point, we are not even seen as human beings,” she explains about her choice to tell the story of her country through the lens of one family’s story. “I don’t think people have been able to see the humanity. It’s been suppressed. It’s just not there. It’s not shown.”

Dabis wanted to show how much violence the Palestinian people have suffered. We see how it affects the family.

“The word ‘occupation’ is actually quite benign,” she points out. “It’s a very violent experience. Military occupation is violent on a daily basis. It is different kinds of violence, which I think I show in the film. It is not just physical. It is psychological. It’s emotional. It’s humiliation. It’s harassment. So it was important to de-politicize the film as much as possible.”

The film was made when the conflict between Israel and Palestine escalated. They could no longer shoot the film in Palestine.

“We suddenly found ourselves making a movie about what was happening,” she says. “That deepened the emotional intensity of everything; the making of the film, but also the film itself. The actors and I talked a lot about how it felt like we were channeling grief more than we were acting. And so the film became an outlet for all of us in some way.”

Important Women’s Issues

Dolores Fonzi’s film Belén deals with an actual high-profile case in Argentina, where a young Argentine woman was falsely accused of infanticide after a miscarriage in 2014. She went to prison. The film follows the lawyer who took her case, played by Fonzi herself. She also co-wrote the film and produced it.

“It was a very personal story for me,” explains Fonzi, who gave a heartfelt speech highlighting the injustice of the Belén case at an award ceremony in Argentina at the time. “For me, it was very easy to be creative about it, because I was so deeply involved in it at the time and it felt so very personal to me.”

Fonzi grew up in a religious household in Argentina, where abortion was illegal up until 2020. Her upbringing was Catholic. But today, she sees cinema as her religion. She sees it as a way to transform the world.

“I really believe that art and all the disciplines of art can change minds and reflections,” says Fonzi. “I don’t think cinema can do miracles. Some religions believe in miracles, but I believe that if a movie can change the way you think or feel, it is a kind of miracle.”

Petra Biondina Volpe’s Late Shift, which represents Switzerland, is a film about a dedicated nurse, played by Leonie Benesch, who literally races against time during a shift. It is a film that also reveals the statistics of a critically underfunded healthcare system, where the nurses have an impossible task.

“It concerns all of us,” says Volpe about the challenges of the nurse shortage all over the world. “The story of the nurse is notoriously underrepresented and when you see hospital shows, they are usually about the doctors, who are glorified or not. In reality, the nurses have an immense responsibility and they are the closest people to the patients. We need to celebrate them and my film is basically a love letter to nurses and a celebration of their importance for our overall society.”

Speaking out for Silenced Women

Brazilian director Marianna Brennand Fortes’ Manas is a powerful film about the cycle of sexual abuse on the large secluded island of Marajó in the Amazon rainforest of northern Brazil.

“Sexual violence is a violence that should not happen. It should not exist,” says Brennard Fortes on a zoom call from her home in São Paolo. “So as a woman director, how could I react to a violence that should never exist?”

The documentary filmmaker decided to make a fictional story of how 13-year-old Marcielle is forced to take matters into her own hands, when the system fails her. The director did not want any abuse victims having to relive their trauma, so she wrote a fictional story based on many factual stories. However, the actual abuse is never shown.

“It was a very important choice to be a woman director, producer and co-writer to be able to tell a story about women in a way that respects us and in a way that we are supposed to be portrayed. It has to respect our bodies, our existence, our hearts and our souls.”

Manas focuses on Marcielle’s story, but it becomes clear that the problem is far-reaching. Marcielle’s mother has also been abused and so has many of the girls and women in the small community.

“The character of the mother represents the cycle of abuse, the mechanism going through generations,” explains Brennand Fortes. “The abuse has become very normalized.  But I think that as a society, we really have to fight against gender violence becoming a culture.”

Brennard Fortes reminds us that sexual abuse happens everywhere.

“My hope is that every woman and girl and boy, who is going through some kind of violence will feel seen, understood, and encouraged to break their silences. Sometimes you break your silence by understanding what’s happening to you or by telling a friend or by denouncing it.”

Women Voices Represented

The directors we spoke to welcomed the fact that 30 percent of the submissions for Golden Globe consideration in the Non-English Language category are directed by women.

“I’m really happy that we are 16 women from all over the world,” says Brennand Fortes. “That is very significant. They are all representing their countries, their culture, their social questions and problems and realities. To have this diverse panorama of what’s going on in the world told from a female perspective is quite transformative.“

However, Petra Bionda Volpe, who experienced a wave of studios giving women opportunities when she did campaigning for her film The Divine Order eight years ago, has now seen a new less positive trend.

“At the moment that’s actually back-rolled,” she says.  “I recently read an article with statistics on how few big-budget films are done by women. It is shockingly few. So there has been quite the backlash against women working on big budget films and we are not being given the same opportunities.”

The list of female directors in the Non-English Language Film Golden Globe submissions includes Laura Piani, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (France), Shahad Ameen, Hijra (Saudi Arabia), Mailys Vallade, co-director of Little Amélie or the Character of Rain (France), Shih-Ching Tsou, Left-Handed Girl (Taiwan), Rebecca Zlotowski, A Private Life (France), Kaouther Ben Haria, The Voice of Hind Rajab (Tunisia), Mascha Schilinski, Sound of Falling (Germany), Lakshmipriya Devi, Boong (India), Anne Marie Jacir, Palestine 36 (Palestine), Caroline Labaki, BornStars (Lebanon), Agnieszka Holland, Franz (Poland) and Sarah Goher, Happy Birthday (Egypt).

“I thought we were less than that, so I am very happily surprised,” concludes Fonzi about the representation of female directors in this category. “But 30 percent is still not okay. We want more!”