Antonia's Line

Marleen Gorris's Antonia's Line (Antonia) won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1996, only the third Dutch film to do so, and the first directed by a woman to win the category. The film cemented Gorris, previously best known for A Question of Silence (1982), as one of the most internationally significant Dutch directors of her generation. She would go on to direct the British Mrs Dalloway (1997) with Vanessa Redgrave.

On the morning of her death, the elderly Dutch matriarch Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy) looks back at the half-century she spent returning to her family's farming village in the southern Netherlands after the Second World War and building, stubbornly and without men's permission, a chosen family of women across four generations. Her daughter Danielle is a painter; her granddaughter Thérèse a philosophy prodigy; the friends and tenants who orbit the matrilineal household include the village's other outsiders.

The film operates simultaneously as feminist family chronicle, magical-realist fable, and broad post-war village comedy. Gorris had built her reputation in the early 1980s with the polemical A Question of Silence and Broken Mirrors; Antonia's Line brought her formal preoccupations into a warmer register, and the resulting Oscar (the Netherlands' first ever in the Best Foreign Language Film category) gave Dutch cinema its most visible international moment of the 1990s. Its mainstream commercial reach has been modest; its standing in feminist film criticism has been substantial and continuing.