Niki Caro Confronts Hollywood’s Backslide on Women Behind the Camera as She Leads Camerimage Jury

For more than two decades, New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro has built a career that has swung between breakout indie success and the upper echelons of studio filmmaking.

She first drew international attention with Whale Rider, a small, community-rooted drama that became a global phenomenon and earned Keisha Castle-Hughes an Oscar nomination. Caro followed with North Country (2005) for Warner Bros., The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017) for Focus, and then the biggest leap of her career: Directing Disney’s live-action Mulan (2020), which was shot across continents and budget tiers and became one of the pandemic-era’s most scrutinised studio releases. Most recently she helmed the Jennifer Lopez thriller The Mother (2023) for Netflix, a hit for the streamer.

This year she steps into a different spotlight: Heading the main jury at the Camerimage Film Festival in Toruń, Poland, the industry’s most influential event dedicated to cinematography. It is a conspicuous appointment, coming a…