The Oscars’ worldwide characteristic class of 2026 contains sweeping epics, intense thrillers, black comedies and haunting dramas, however three submissions put younger feminine performers on the forefront. Their stars, from Iraq, Chile and Argentina, are additionally first-time or comparatively unknown actors. And their fascinating performances show the wealth of on-screen expertise hidden in all corners of the world.
‘The President’s Cake’
For nearly 20 years, Iraqi schoolchildren lived in concern over the birthday of Saddam Hussein. The celebrations required that one scholar, chosen randomly, bake a cake in honor of the nation’s authoritarian ruler — a process requiring time and sources prohibitive to a lot of the inhabitants. For filmmaker Hasan Hadi, it’s an expertise that haunts him to at the present time.
“One yr I used to be picked as a flower boy. Flowers have been a lot simpler as a result of often academics don’t actually care about them as a result of they’re not edible,” Hadi explains. “However the factor is, my buddy was picked for the birthday cake, and he couldn’t make it. And his destiny completely modified. He obtained recruited to Saddam’s youngsters military. He was expelled from the college. And I really feel prefer it was type of chasing me. This survival guilt. What if it was me?”
Hadi’s characteristic directorial debut, “Cake” follows Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), a 9-year-old dwelling together with her grandmother in Iraq’s Mesopotamian Marshes. Lamia’s life is turned the wrong way up as she faces one impediment after one other to bake the cake. As with virtually your entire forged, Nayef was a first-time actor, and Hadi was admittedly nervous as they have been coming all the way down to the wire in casting the position.
“Sooner or later, my buddy recorded a few children on the road, and he or she was one in every of them,” Hadi recollects. “It was a 30-second video. She says her title, her class or college. And I instantly felt like, ‘OK, that is the child I believe can maintain the movie collectively.’ I known as the mother and father, and so they have been towards it. They refused to do something with the movie.”
Finally, regardless of their fears over how their daughter can be judged by Iraqi society, Hadi satisfied Nayef’s mother and father to relent and let her take part. Months later, your entire household attended the Cannes Movie Pageant, the place “Cake” took the Viewers Award within the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, partially because of her fascinating efficiency.
“I actually hope she continues performing,” Hadi says. “I actually suppose she will be a type of stars that can provide beginning to so many movies in Iraq.”
‘The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo’
To convey his imaginative melodrama set in a fictional Chilean mining city to life, Diego Céspedes was on the hunt for a cabaret of standout queer drag performers. The younger director labored intently with the group, auditioning nonprofessional {and professional} actors, however admits “it was a extremely exhausting job” that took a yr and a half. The precedence, nonetheless, was casting 11-year-old Lidia, a younger woman whose future comes undone as a “plague,” the AIDS disaster, envelops everybody round her. Céspedes discovered his Lidia in newcomer Tamara Cortés.
“We forged a number of women, however Tamara was proper, and he or she had the perspective,” Céspedes recollects. “She was tremendous humorous and, a very powerful factor, she didn’t have any prejudices with the ladies of the canteen. They have been simply individuals for her. And now, they’re all shut individuals to her. They’re household for her too.”
Céspedes admits that not the entire youthful actors understood what they have been entering into, and divulges that one younger actor’s mother and father finally ended his involvement because of their homophobia and transphobia: “They didn’t say [it to us] however we heard a dialog about them, and so they took the boy out of the film.”
That have was greater 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 a number of documentary tasks, and Céspedes initially recruited her for a brief movie a couple of years in the past. He recollects, “I informed her, ‘I would like you again. I would like you to do an actual character, fictional.’ She’s tremendous gifted. And we did that quick and he or she began to get requires the whole lot. And with this characteristic movie, they’re calling her loads now as a result of she’s a pure.”
‘Belén’
As abortion rights have receded in america, they’ve been on the march in South America. In 2021, the Argentine authorities legalized the process for the primary time and dropped all felony expenses towards girls accused of getting them. However there have been many battles to cross this threshold, most lately surrounding the horrifying case of Belén (a pseudonym), a younger lady who spent three years in jail after struggling a miscarriage within the conservative province of Tucumán. Her conviction was ultimately overturned because of the crusading efforts of lawyer Soledad Deza, a story chronicled in Dolores Fonzi’s appropriately titled “Belén.”
Within the flawed arms, the story may have ended up as a sensationalized movie-of-the-week. As an alternative, Fonzi, who additionally portrays Deza on display, crafts a fascinating and highly effective drama that transcends the style. Her most essential resolution was casting the title position. She discovered her Belén, Camila Plaate, in a documentary set in the identical jail her topic was incarcerated in.
“The [reenactment sequences in] the documentary have been with these two women, Camila Plaate and Ruth Plaate, who play Belén and her sister and who’re sisters in actual life,” Fonzi reveals. “So, I knew these two actresses from Tucumán have been going to be these actresses in my film.”
Winner of one of the best supporting actress prize on the 2025 San Sebastian Movie Pageant, Fonzi says Plaate was “superb since minute one.” She provides, “I obtained a crush on her and on her sister, they’re very sturdy girls, Tucumán artists. Tucumán is a really conservative city, and they’re the resistance.”
As for any fears that present firebrand Argentine President Javier Milei and his La Libertad Avanza celebration may overturn the comparatively new regulation, Fonzi believes trying to take action can be “political suicide.”
“We obtained 6 million individuals within the streets to make the regulation occur,” Fonzi says. “He’s loopy. Nothing would shock me, however I don’t suppose he would enter in that cave.”
