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The 95th Academy Awards ceremony will be held in Los Angeles on March 12, 2023. The highly anticipated annual event has received a lot of criticism in the past decade for its lack of diversity in its nominations and awards. Needless to say, the iconic statuette of the Oscars has a long history of recognizing white men only.

In 95 years, only three women have won the Academy Award for best director: Kathryn Bigelow for Hurt Locker in 2010, Chloé Zhao for Nomadland in 2021, and Jane Campion for The Power Of The Dog in 2022, and only three have won Best International Feature Film, however, many more have been nominated, and their pieces are worthy of praise.

Astrid Henning-Jensen: Nominated For Paw In 1959

Astrid Henning-Jensen was the first woman to be nominated for Best International Feature Film in 1959. Her movie, Paw, also known as The Boy of Two Worlds, follows the story of a biracial...

The film medium, all too often, is boxed or labeled into specific genres, and when it comes time for awards, that’s the only place voters deem “appropriate” for recognition. This includes documentaries, international and animated features, as well big-budget blockbusters that only find distinction in sound and visual effects, or comedies in a rare instance of the screenplay and a supporting acting nomination.

We’ve seen an eclectic and vibrant selection of films unveiled in this unconventional year. While milestone recognitions look to be on the horizon, all awards voters still have work to do in getting a more dynamic number of films recognized in other key categories. We’ve seen AMPAS take an important step in the right direction with HBO’s “Welcome to Chechnya,” which made the shortlists for both documentary and visual effects. Like last year’s “Honeyland,” which was nominated for both international and documentary feature,...

Edinburgh exhibitor Filmhouse is to tour a season of films about childhood across the UK, curated by documentary filmmaker Mark Cousins.

The season will comprise 17 films about childhood (see below for full list).

Most of the titles in the season are featured in Cousins’ documentary A Story of Children and Film, which premiered at Cannes last year.

The April-June tour will take in London, Belfast, Cardiff, Nottingham, Glasgow, Brighton, Bristol and Sheffield among other cities.

The season is managed by Filmhouse, which has also licensed VoD rights to a number of the titles.

The project is backed by the BFI’s Programming Development Fund. Adam Dawtrey and Mary Bell, who also produced A Story of Children and Film, are producers.

The full list of titles screening in the Cinema of Childhood season are:

• “Willow and Wind” (Bid-o Baad). Iran, Japan, 1999. D. Mohammad-Ali Talebi. 77 mins. A boy breaks a school window, and must mend...

This German animation about a lunar visitor to Earth is a sweet and eccentric alternative to Hollywood children's fare

Der Mondmann, or Moon Man, is a quirky new children's animation from Germany, now redubbed into English, based on the 1967 picture book by the French illustrator Tomi Ungerer. The movie has an oddball charm and innocence; it is like a footnote to Spielberg's Et, and looks to me a little like Astrid Henning-Jensen's 1940s children's fantasy Palle Alone in the World, a movie featured in Mark Cousins's recent cine-essay A Story of Children and Film. The man in the moon makes a trip to Earth, which is governed by a preposterous megalomaniac "President", who is himself obsessed with conquering the moon, and bullies a reclusive scientist into inventing a "rocket" to help him to get up there. Weirdly, despite its lack of progress with space-travel technology, this alternative-reality Earth...

Critic and director Mark Cousins is receiving rave reviews at Cannes for his inspirational film about cinema and childhood. He tells Charlotte Higgins why it's the decade of the cine-essay

You can tell a lot about Mark Cousins from his tattoos. The Edinburgh-based, Belfast-born presenter, critic and film-maker, whose richly poetic A Story of Children and Film has just premiered to five-star reviews at Cannes, has arms inscribed with words. There's "Forough" on his right. That's Forough Farrokhzad, "the first great Iranian film director," he says. "Her The House Is Black is one of the greatest movies ever made." On his left there's "Le Corbusier", the French architect; and "Eisenstein", the Russian director about whom he recently made a film while undertaking a three-day tramp through Mexico City.

Then, on the inside of his left arm, are the words "the oar and the winnowing fan". This is a reference to...

Nadine Labaki, Where Do We Go Now? Today it was announced that Patty Jenkins, whose Monster earned Charlize Theron a Best Actress Oscar in early 2004, will be directing Thor 2. Officially, Perkins is the first woman director at the helm of a big-budget, Hollywood superhero movie. Below you'll find ten movies directed by female filmmakers that are among the 63 contenders for nominations for the 2012 Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language Film category. Seven of those hail from Europe; one is from the Americas, one from East Asia, and one from West Asia (or the Middle East). They are: the Dominican Republic's Leticia Tonos for Love Child, France's Valérie Donzelli for the semi-autobiographical Declaration of War, Greece's Athina Rachel Tsangari for Attenberg, Hong Kong's Ann Hui for A Simple Life, and Ireland's Juanita Wilson for As If I Am Not There. Also: Lebanon's Nadine Labaki for Toronto Film Festival Audience Award winner Where Do We Go Now?...

Cinematographer with a cool, austere style who linked the eras of Dreyer and Von Trier

If the Danish cinematographer Henning Bendtsen, who has died aged 85, had shot nothing else but Carl Dreyer's final masterpieces, Ordet (The Word, 1955) and Gertrud (1964), he would have been entitled to a place in the pantheon of cinema. Although he shot 57 features, it was his collaboration with the saintly Dreyer on these two films which conferred an enviable eminence on him.

"It turned out to be a very harmonious collaboration between Dreyer and me, which always will be the most valuable association I have experienced within my profession," Bendtsen recalled. "We quickly connected with each other, both as professionals and as humans."

As can be seen in Ordet and Gertrud, it is clear that Bendtsen understood what Dreyer meant by "realised mysticism". The contrasting tonality of lighting both reflects and creates the moods within the same frame,...

While planning a trip to a village in rural Iraq to show films to children who had never seen any before, Mark Cousins had to decide which films to show them. Here's what he chose

What are the best kids' films ever made? I had to answer this question about 18 months ago when I was planning a trip to a village in the Kurdish part of northern Iraq, to make a little tented outdoor cinema there. I wanted to entertain the kids in the village by showing them films, and I filmed them watching the movies for my new documentary, The First Film. None of them had ever been to the cinema before, and I had just three nights – so what would I show?

My first choice was easy. There's a Danish film called Palle Alone in the World, about a wee boy who wakes up one morning to find all the adults have disappeared.

The exuberant film critic's tremendous new documentary The First Movie records the triumph of imagination, even over war

Not many critics also get to be accomplished film-makers, but one such is Mark Cousins, a brilliantly exuberant movie writer whose passionate, celebratory and sensual relationship with the cinema is, I think, a refreshing corrective to the over-snarky tendencies of Fleet Street criticism. Many will know him from the sadly defunct BBC series Scene by Scene, which ran from 1996 to 2001, from his excellent one-volume cinema history The Story of Film and also from his collaborative partnership with Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton. It was this partnership which gave birth to the Nairn film festival.

This was, and is, an ongoing experiment in reinventing cinema as a grassroots audience experience, a way of bringing the cinema to people without the intermediate commercial panoply of exhibitors and distributors. Cousins and Swinton created a travelling roadshow,...