Spain won’t announce its Academy Award candidate until September 7, but the country has revealed their short-list of contenders, and two of the three films are directed by women: Iciar Bollain’s “The Olive Tree” and Paula Ortiz’s “The Bride.”
Variety writes that “The Olive Tree,” Bollain’s seventh feature, “follows a family in a village in Eastern Spain, where the father and uncle decide to sell its more-than-1,000 year old olive tree to a property developer down on the coast, despite the opposition of the grandfather and the daughter (Anna Castillo). When the grandfather ails, his granddaughter sets out on a madcap adventure to retrieve the tree, now in Germany.”
Bollain began her career as an actress and made her feature debut as a filmmaker with the 1996 comedy “Hi, Are You Alone?” Her film “Even the Rain” was Spain’s Oscar submission in 2010.
Filmed in Turkey, Ortiz’s “The Bride” tells the story of “a woman promised to one man but who elopes with a former lover the same day of her wedding. The jilted groom’s mother — a symbol of Spain’s tyrant conservative classes demand for social propriety and merciless revenge — argues that only murder will restore lost honor.” The film is based on “Blood Wedding,” Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1933 tragedy.
Ortiz, an associate professor at the University of Barcelona, released her first feature in 2011, “From Your Window to Mine.”
In the past five years, one of Spain’s Academy Award submissions was helmed by a woman: Gracia Querejeta’s “15 Years and One Day” in 2014.
