'Emilia Pérez' Controversy Inspires Mexican Short Film About France Without French People

The ongoing controversy surrounding the France-filmed Emilia Pérez, which leads this year’s Oscars nominations with 13 total nods, has led to the release of a Mexican short film that playfully flips the script in direct response to the lack of Mexican actors and crew members in Emilia Pérez.

Titled Johanne Sacreblu, the short, helmed by Mexican trans woman Camila D. Aurora (a.k.a. Camiileo), spans 28 minutes and has become something of a hit on Letterboxd, where it’s been logged as watched by nearly 18,000 users as of this writing. In terms of reviews on the platform, its current weighted average rests at 4.6 after just over 16,000 ratings. The film is notably about France, the home country of Emilia Pérez director Jacques Audiard, but was made in Mexico, and only stars Mexican performers.

Emilia Pérez, meanwhile, has a weighted average of 2.4 from nearly 300,000 ratings. The musical stars Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, and Selena Gomez. At this month’s Golden Globes, hosted by Nikki Glaser, the film won four awards, besting A24’s breathtaking The Brutalist by one.

The awards season success of Emilia Pérez, written and directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, has highlighted one hell of a chasm in how the film has been received. In November, the same month the film hit Netflix, GLAAD slammed it as a “profoundly retrograde portrayal of a trans woman.” The film has faced similarly impassioned criticism in Mexico, at one point the subject of a petition calling it “insensitive” and “disrespectful to our culture.” That petition has since garnered nearly 12,000 signatures.

Amid the growing questions surrounding Emilia Pérez’s awards season dominance, a larger discussion has been spurred about the 2024 titles that have thus been ignored, including Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow. Itself a trans allegory, the A24-distributed film is, without a doubt, one of the best films of 2024, and is, in this writer's opinion, brilliantly unlike anything else released that year. Critics agree.

For longtime Oscars enthusiasts, the Emilia Pérez controversy calls to mind the reception to Paul Haggis’ 2004 title Crash, which ultimately took home Best Picture, a shock to many at the time.

This year's winners are set to be revealed in March with first-time host Conan O'Brien. For the full list of nominees, revisit Complex's coverage here.