Jacques Audiard’s film Emilia Pérez will be France’s entry in the international feature film category at the 96th Academy Awards, to be bestowed on March 2, 2025.

Desribed as a “redemption thriller” and as a “queer crime musical,” the Spanish-language drama film won two significant awards at the recent Cannes Film Festival: the Jury Prize and a Best Actress Prize for Karla Sofía Gascón, who portrays the role of a Mexican drug lord in their quest for gender-affirming surgery. Supporting cast members include Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz.

Emilia Pérez will be available on Netflix in the United States and the United Kingdom. It also debuted at the recent Telluride and Toronto festivals and will open the American French Festival in Los Angeles on October 29. Its U.S. theatrical premiere is set for November 1 at selected venues.

Audiard earlier won a Palme d’Or at Cannes for Dheepan. His earlier film, A Prophet, starring Tahar Rahim, had also been nominated for a foreign-language Oscar. Among his other award-winning productions are Rust and Bone, See How They Fall, and A Self-Made Hero. Audiard also made music videos, including Comme Elle Vient, in which all of the actors were speech- and hearing-impaired and used sign language to interpret the songs.

Emilia Pérez had been shortlisted for the Oscar nomination with three other contenders: Alexandre de La Patellière’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Pyal Kapadia’ All We Imagine as Light, and Alan Guiraudie’s Misericordia.

The chair of this year’s France’s Oscar nominating committee is Charles Tesson, who had served earlier as the artistic director of Cannes’ Critics Week A new committee was installed to avoid the controversy of last year’s group, which had chosen The Taste of Things”, a reputedly weaker film, over Anatomy of a Fall, which eventually won an Oscar for best original screenplay.

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