The Father

Florian Zeller's The Father won two Academy Awards at the 93rd Academy Awards in April 2021 — Best Actor for Anthony Hopkins (his second Oscar, thirty years after The Silence of the Lambs; at eighty-three he became the oldest acting winner in the history of the prize) and Best Adapted Screenplay for Zeller and Christopher Hampton. Hopkins also won the equivalent BAFTA, with Zeller and Hampton winning the BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film received six Oscar nominations in total, including Best Picture and Best Director.

The film is adapted from Zeller's own 2012 stage play Le Père, which had been one of the most internationally successful French plays of the 2010s — performed in over forty-five countries and adapted for the West End and Broadway, with Frank Langella winning the Tony Award for Best Actor in the New York production in 2016. Zeller had directed neither stage nor film professionally before; The Father is his feature directing debut, made under unusual circumstances in which a forty-one-year-old playwright led an Oscar-winning production from his first script.

The supporting cast pairs Hopkins with Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Olivia Williams, Imogen Poots and Rufus Sewell; Colman would also be nominated for Best Supporting Actress at both the Oscars and BAFTAs. Cinematography is by Ben Smithard and the score is by Ludovico Einaudi. Zeller would direct a sister-film follow-up, The Son, in 2022 with Hugh Jackman; the third panel of the loose Mother / Father / Son stage trilogy has not been filmed.