The Oscars’ worldwide function 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 worry over the birthday of Saddam Hussein. The celebrations required that one pupil, chosen randomly, bake a cake in honor of the nation’s authoritarian ruler — a job requiring time and assets prohibitive to a lot of the inhabitants. For filmmaker Hasan Hadi, it’s an expertise that haunts him to today.
“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 function directorial debut, “Cake” follows Lamia (Banin Ahmad Nayef), a 9-year-old residing along 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 complete solid, Nayef was a first-time actor, and Hadi was admittedly nervous as they had been coming right down to the wire in casting the function.
“One day, my friend recorded a couple of kids on the street, and she was one of them,” Hadi recollects. “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.”
Finally, regardless of their fears over how their daughter can be judged by Iraqi society, Hadi satisfied Nayef’s dad and mom to relent and let her take part. Months later, your complete household attended the Cannes Movie Competition, the place “Cake” took the Viewers Award within the Director’s Fortnight sidebar, partially due to her fascinating efficiency.
“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 carry 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 neighborhood, auditioning nonprofessional {and professional} actors, however admits “it was a really hard job” that took a 12 months and a half. The precedence, nevertheless, 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 cast a lot of girls, but Tamara was right, and she had the attitude,” Céspedes recollects. “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 the entire youthful actors understood what they had been moving into, and divulges that one younger actor’s dad and mom finally ended his involvement on account 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 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 just a few years in the past. He recollects, “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 USA, they’ve been on the march in South America. In 2021, the Argentine authorities legalized the process for the primary time and dropped all legal prices towards ladies accused of getting them. However there have been many battles to cross this threshold, most just lately surrounding the horrifying case of Belén (a pseudonym), a younger girl who spent three years in jail after struggling a miscarriage within the conservative province of Tucumán. Her conviction was finally overturned due to 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 a substitute, Fonzi, who additionally portrays Deza on display screen, crafts a fascinating and highly effective drama that transcends the style. Her most vital choice was casting the title function. 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 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 one of the best supporting actress prize on the 2025 San Sebastian Movie Competition, Fonzi says Plaate was “amazing since minute one.” She provides, “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 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 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.”
