On 7 January, the Best International Feature Film panels hosted by the Palm Springs International Film Festival (2-12 January) turned into a brisk, candid masterclass on craft, constraint and conviction; which also gave European observers an opportunity to gauge the prospects of European players likely to be in the running for Oscars.

Split into two sessions moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s Mia Galuppo and Kevin Cassidy, the event put a global slate of filmmakers on stage. Yet several European voices consistently steered the discussion toward the kind of artistic choices that tend to define an international campaign: tone, authorship, formal risk, and the politics of production.

Norwegian director Joachim Trier, presenting Sentimental Value [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], framed his latest feature as an emotional balancing act shaped by personal change. “On a personal level, it was my first film after becoming a father, and the film deals with a difficult father-daughter relationship. That resonated deeply,” he said, before zooming out to the broader challenge: “Professionally, it was about balancing tone across many characters. We aimed for a polyphonic structure—no villains, just people. Maintaining tonal unity across performances was something I remained nervous about throughout.” Later, Trier described how place becomes a narrative engine, recounting his family’s real-life decision to sell a house built in 1906 by his great-great-grandfather. “Memory is a theme in all my films—this is my sixth. And in a basic way, I feel memory needs a stage,” he noted. “Our memories reside in place.”

Meanwhile, Sirāt [+lee también:
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ficha de la película]’s Óliver Laxe argued for cinema as a spiritual ordeal—one built on landscape and sound as much as story. On depicting the film’s violent passages, he admitted: “I was afraid of being misunderstood. My intention was to take care of the spectator—it’s a kind of shock therapy.” His most striking intervention came when Galuppo asked about the film’s desert setting. “I like to shoot in nature. And not because it’s ‘beautiful nature’—but because nature manifests, nature speaks, it shakes you, it cares for you,” he said, drawing on a decade living in Morocco, including five years in the desert. For Laxe, the setting becomes a moral arena: “The desert is also a place where you can’t hide… You stop scrolling, and you listen.” And, in the bluntest formulation of the afternoon, he declared: “With Sirāt, we wanted the spectator to 'die' while watching the film—because it can be healthy. We need to learn how to die with dignity. And the desert is the perfect place for that training.” On sound, Laxe rejected the idea that transcendence must be coded as “classical,” insisting instead on electronic music’s metaphysical potential: “But electronic music is abstraction. You don’t know the source of the sound.”

The second panel shifted from creative anxieties to the raw logistics of filmmaking under pressure. Jafar Panahi, whose latest It Was Just an Accident [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] is France’s Oscar submission, offered a deadpan lesson in how constraint becomes method: “When you make underground films, you have to work with the fewest people and the least resources. If the crew grows, you draw attention, and you’ll be arrested.” His remarks widened into a manifesto about authorship and responsibility. “I believe a filmmaker has to satisfy themselves first before they can satisfy an audience,” he said. “Your work has to be valuable enough to you that you accept putting your signature on it.” Recalling a student short he later disowned, he added: “But when it was finished, I saw everything was correct—and it was nonsense… When the time came, I went to the [editing] lab, stole all the negatives, and destroyed them so no one could ever get their hands on the film.” The core test, Panahi insisted, is brutally simple: “Are you embarrassed by this film? That’s the most important question.” He also said that, once the awards campaign is over, he plans to return to Iran, explaining that he feels like a tourist everywhere else and cannot imagine living anywhere other than his home country, despite charges that could see him spend at least a year in prison.

Switzerland's Petra Volpe, director of Late Shift [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], connected cinematic realism with a broader cultural blind spot: the systematic devaluation of nursing. “Nursing is a predominantly female profession, and it’s still crassly undervalued. It’s invisible work, taken for granted,” she said, stressing that the crisis is not confined to one country: “It’s a global problem. Everywhere we’ve shown the film, people recognise it. If this isn’t pushed to the top of the political agenda, we will all feel the consequences.” Her craft emphasis was equally precise: “The technical challenge was showing an eight-hour shift in ninety minutes and making it feel seamless, without viewers noticing what’s missing.” Later, she highlighted the discipline behind performance, “So the script was extremely precise: every movement, every drawer she opens, every little action was scripted.”

Germany's Mascha Schilinski positioned Sound of Falling [+lee también:
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ficha de la película] as an argument against linearity. “It’s about memory, and how memory and imagination flow into each other—how time can be simultaneous,” she explained, describing a multi-decade story set in the Altmark region. Sound, in her telling, becomes prophecy: “Because the sound in the film anticipates what will happen, but the characters don’t know it yet. That’s sometimes what trauma is.” The project’s very premise made it, in her words, “almost unpitchable.” “Whenever we tried to impose a plot, the screenplay itself felt like it was screaming: please don’t do this — because I was interested in invisible things,” she said, before describing the eventual breakthrough; structuring the film like memory itself.

Other filmmakers — Kaouther Ben Hania, Hasan Hadi, Dolores Fonzi, Neeraj Ghaywan, Shih-Ching Tsou, Annemarie Jacir, Cherien Dabis and Lee Sang-il — rounded out the day with vivid accounts of scale, realism and political urgency. But in Palm Springs, the European contingent delivered the clearest awards-season subtext: films that treat form as ethics, production as worldview, and authorship as something you either sign—or destroy.