2023 Gotham Awards Nominations

Sandra Hüller stars in two of the other four international contenders, Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, the winner of this year’s Palme d’Or in Cannes, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, for which Hüller is nominated for Outstanding Supporting Performance. Rounding out the category are Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, which won the Golden Lion in Venice, and Lila Avilés’s Tótem, which introduces Naíma Sentíes as Sol, a seven-year-old getting ready to help throw a surprise party for her father. “Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty,” writes Greg Nussen for Slant, “using Sol as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality.”

Leading the nominees for Best Feature with three each are Past Lives, the debut feature from playwright Celine Song, and A. V. Rockwell’s A Thousand and One, the winner of a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Greta Lee, who plays a New York–based Korean writer who rekindles a childhood friendship in Past Lives, is nominated for Outstanding Lead Performance, and both Song and Rockwell are among the five Breakthrough Director nominees. Also in the running for Best Feature are Passages, a European love triangle directed by Ira Sachs and starring Outstanding Lead Performance nominee Franz Rogowski; Reality, Tina Satter’s restaging of the FBI interrogation of Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney); and Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt’s fourth collaboration with Michelle Williams.

Of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature, two have made the shortlist for this year’s IDA Documentary Awards. The Guardian’s Ryan Gilbey describes Sarvnik Kaur’s Against the Tide as a study of “two fishers and friends from Mumbai’s Koli community pursuing their livelihoods by different means.” The strength of the film “lies in its even-handedness, its insistence that both men are at the mercy of the same capitalist and ecological catastrophes.” Lea Glob’s Apolonia, Apolonia, a portrait of French painter Apolonia Sokol, is “layered and substantial,” writes Guy Lodge for Variety, “pondering as it does matters of individual creative principle, the predominantly patriarchal functions of critique and patronage, and the economic reality of millennial bohemianism.”

In other news arriving early this awards season, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association will present its 2023 Career Achievement award to Green Border director Agnieszka Holland. “At a time of increasing worldwide unrest,” says LAFCA president Robert Abele, “with authoritarianism on the rise, Holland’s fiercely humane films remind us history isn’t entirely behind us, and that a vibrantly political cinema is more vital now than ever.”