(Chloe Zola / For The Times)
The Oscars’ international feature class of 2026 includes sweeping epics, intense thrillers, black comedies and haunting dramas, but three submissions put young female performers at the forefront. Their stars, from Iraq, Chile and Argentina, are also first-time or relatively unknown actors. And their captivating performances demonstrate the wealth of on-screen talent hidden in all corners of the world.
‘The President’s Cake’
For almost 20 years, Iraqi schoolchildren lived in fear over the birthday of Saddam Hussein. The celebrations required that one student, selected randomly, bake a cake in honor of the nation’s authoritarian ruler — a task requiring time and resources prohibitive to much of the population. For filmmaker Hasan Hadi, it’s an experience that haunts him to this day.
“One year I was picked as a flower boy. Flowers were much easier because usually teachers don’t really care about them because they’re not edible,” Hadi explains. “But the thing is, my friend was picked for the birthday cake, and he couldn’t make it. And his fate totally changed. He got recruited to Saddam’s children army. He was expelled from the school. And I feel like it was kind of chasing me. This survival guilt. What if it was me?”
Hadi’s feature directorial debut, “Cake” follows Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), a 9-year-old living with her grandmother in Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes. Lamia’s life is turned upside down as she faces one obstacle after another to bake the cake. As with almost the entire cast, Nayef was a first-time actor, and Hadi was admittedly nervous as they were coming down to the wire in casting the role.
“One day, my friend recorded a couple of kids on the street, and she was one of them,” Hadi recalls. “It was a 30-second video. She says her name, her class or school. And I immediately felt like, ‘OK, this is the kid I think can hold the film together.’ I called the parents, and they were against it. They refused to do anything with the film.”
Eventually, despite their fears over how their daughter would be judged by Iraqi society, Hadi convinced Nayef’s parents to relent and let her participate. Months later, the entire family attended the Cannes Film Festival, where “Cake” took the Audience Award in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, partially thanks to her captivating performance.
“I really hope she continues acting,” Hadi says. “I really think she can be one of those stars that can give birth to so many films in Iraq.”
‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo’
To bring his imaginative melodrama set in a fictional Chilean mining town to life, Diego Céspedes was on the hunt for a cabaret of standout queer drag performers. The young director worked closely with the community, auditioning nonprofessional and professional actors, but admits “it was a really hard job” that took a year and a half. The priority, however, was casting 11-year-old Lidia, a young girl whose future comes undone as a “plague,” the AIDS crisis, envelops everyone around her. Céspedes found his Lidia in newcomer Tamara Cortés.
“We cast a lot of girls, but Tamara was right, and she had the attitude,” Céspedes recalls. “She was super funny and, the most important thing, she didn’t have any prejudices with the girls of the canteen. They were just people for her. And now, they’re all close people to her. They’re family for her too.”
Céspedes admits that not all of the younger actors understood what they were getting into, and reveals that one young actor’s parents ultimately ended his involvement as a result of their homophobia and transphobia: “They didn’t say [it to us] but we heard a conversation about them, and they took the boy out of the movie.”
That experience was more than assuaged by Cortés and by the presence of magnificent trans actress Paula Dinamarca, who portrays the clan’s seen-it-all matriarch, Madame Boa. Dinamarca had appeared in several documentary projects, and Céspedes initially recruited her for a short film a few years ago. He recalls, “I told her, ‘I want you back. I want you to do a real character, fictional.’ She’s super talented. And we did that short and she started to get calls for everything. And with this feature film, they are calling her a lot now because she’s a natural.”
‘Belén’
As abortion rights have receded in the United States, they have been on the march in South America. In 2021, the Argentine government legalized the procedure for the first time and dropped all criminal charges against women accused of having them. But there were many battles to cross this threshold, most recently surrounding the horrifying case of Belén (a pseudonym), a young woman who spent three years in jail after suffering a miscarriage in the conservative province of Tucumán. Her conviction was eventually overturned thanks to the crusading efforts of lawyer Soledad Deza, a tale chronicled in Dolores Fonzi’s appropriately titled “Belén.”
In the wrong hands, the story could have ended up as a sensationalized movie-of-the-week. Instead, Fonzi, who also portrays Deza on screen, crafts a captivating and powerful drama that transcends the genre. Her most important decision was casting the title role. She found her Belén, Camila Plaate, in a documentary set in the same prison her subject was incarcerated in.
“The [reenactment sequences in] the documentary were with these two girls, Camila Plaate and Ruth Plaate, who play Belén and her sister and who are sisters in real life,” Fonzi reveals. “So, I knew these two actresses from Tucumán were going to be those actresses in my movie.”
Winner of the best supporting actress prize at the 2025 San Sebastian Film Festival, Fonzi says Plaate was “amazing since minute one.” She adds, “I got a crush on her and on her sister, they’re very strong women, Tucumán artists. Tucumán is a very conservative town, and they are the resistance.”
As for any fears that current firebrand Argentine President Javier Milei and his La Libertad Avanza party could overturn the relatively new law, Fonzi believes attempting to do so would be “political suicide.”
“We got 6 million people in the streets to make the law happen,” Fonzi says. “He’s crazy. Nothing would surprise me, but I don’t think he would enter in that cave.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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