Paula van der Oest

Who is Paula van der Oest?

Paula van der Oest is a Dutch film director and screenwriter. Her film Zus & Zo was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

With her final exam at the Dutch Film and Television Academy, Zinderend, she won a Cannon Award in 1988. In the following years, she worked as an assistant director, until she returned in 1994 as a director. For the VPRO-series Lolamoviola she made the short movies Coma and Achilles en het zebrapad. With the first, she won a Golden Calf for the best television drama.

In 1996 Van der Oest made her first long movie, De nieuwe moeder. Her husband at the time, Theu Boermans, had a role in this movie. De trip van Teetje was produced in 1998, with Cees Geel as a louche entrepreneur who buys a Russian cargo ship.

With Zus & Zo, loosely based on Chekhov's The Three Sisters, Van der Oest directed her first mainstream-movie in 2001. The realistic character and the relations among the individuals from her former movies remained central, but there was more humour added, and an English script doctor made some changes, resulting in an Oscar nomination. However, the general public left the movie unseen.