Kathryn Bigelow was the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director in 2009. Lina Wertmuller and Jane Campion were the only women nominated in that category in the 20th Century. But let’s not forget that feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris won the Oscar for Best Film in a Foreign Language in 1995 with Antonia’s Line.
Gorris, who is Dutch, was encouraged to direct by Chantal Ackerman (Jeanne Dielman) when she approached her with her screenplay A Question of Silence in the early 1980s. She followed this with Broken Mirrors (1984) and Last Island (1990). But Antonia’s Line has an unexpected liberated quality, undercutting gravity with mischief and a picaresque feel as the tale spans five decades.
After World War II, Antonia (the splendid Willeke van Ammelrooy) returns to the village where she grew up to bury her dying mother. Together with her bohemian daughter, who is a lesbian, Antonia gradually wins over this insular, eccentric community and builds up a vibrant circle of strong, liberated women.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 15-minute introduction by a local film scholar and be followed by an audience talkback.
The film lulls us into a strange and wonderful mood… [it] incorporates the magic realism of Latin America, dour European philosophies of death, the everyday realities of rural life, a cheerful feminism, a lot of easygoing sex and a gallery of unforgettable characters. By the time the film is over, you feel you could walk down its village streets and greet everyone by name.
Roger Ebert
Antonia is a work of rare lyricism. It glows with the light of a Flemish painting and the spirit of magic realism.
Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer
A feminist fable for all time.
Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle
Marleen Gorris
Willeke van Ammelrooy, Els Dottermans, Mil Seghers
Netherlands
1995
In Dutch with English subtitles
Academy Award, Best Foreign Language Film
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Credits
Screenwriter
Marleen Gorris
Cinematography
Willy Stassen
Editor
Wim Louwrier, Michiel Reichwein
Original Music
Ilona Sekacz
Production Design
Harry Ammerlaan
Art Director
Harry Ammerlaan
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
