The first global recognition Nora Aunor received came in 1981 at the Cannes Film Festival.
Long before Nora Aunor was declared by the Philippine government a National Artist, she was already a certified international artist. In fact, she was the Filipino actor with the most international honors for years.
The first global recognition she received came in 1981 at the Cannes Film Festival, arguably the world’s most prestigious international film festival, where she was given a Jury Prize by critics group Federacion International des Cine-Clubs for her performance in Bona.
Two years later, Himala became the first Filipino film to compete in the Berlin International Film Festival. The buzz at the festival was that she lost the Best Actress prize by a single vote or point. There was speculation that she might have won had she attended the festival. The jury, the spec goes, would have seen just how tiny she was in person and realized just how epic and monumental her performance was in the film.
Nora received her first international trophy in 1995, winning the Best Actress award at the Cairo International Film Festival for her title role in the blockbuster The Flor Contemplacion Story, a biography of the controversial Filipino domestic helper who was hanged by the Singapore government for allegedly killing her fellow maid. The following year, she was nominated for the same film at the Fukuoka International Film Festival.
She returned to the Cairo filmfest in 1997 with the politically charged revenge drama Bakit May Kahapon Pa? and scored one of her three international nominations for the film. The two were from the Singapore International Film Festival and the Malaysia-based East Asia Film and Television Award, where she emerged victorious.
Two years later she was again in the running for Best Actress in Singapore for the domestic drama Sidhi, where she essayed the role of a deaf wife literally suffering in silence in the hands of her philandering husband. Her next win, though, came five years later in Belgium when she took home the award at the 31st Festival International du Film Independent de Bruxelles for Naglalayag. The film is a May-December romance-drama where Nora plays the role of an unmarried and childless middle-aged judge who falls in love and gets pregnant with a young taxi driver.
Her next honors were the back-to-back: retrospective Best Actress awards from Australia’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards (2008) — as part of the Himala’s CNN APSA Viewers Choice Award for Best Asia-Pacific Film of all Time — and Hollywood’s Green Planet Movie Awards (2010) where she was declared one of the 10 Asian Best Actresses of the Decade.
Only two years later, Nora made the biggest harvest of international honors by any Filipino actor for a single film when her performance in Thy Womb made the Best Actress list in seven award-giving bodies. She won her second trophy from Australia’s Asia Pacific Screen Awards and her first from the Sakhalin International Film Festival (Russia), the Venice International Film Festival, where she took home the Bisato d’Oro for Best Actress from an independent critics group outside the festival’s official prizes, and the Asian Film Awards (Hong Kong), where she was also a nominee for the People’s Choice Award for Favorite Actress.
The other Thy Womb nominations were from the Asia Pacific Film Festival (Macau), the Internatioal Film Festival of India, and the Dubai International Film Festival. In the internationally acclaimed drama from 2009 Cannes filmfest Best Director Brillante Mendoza, Nora plays an infertile Badjao midwife who helps her husband find another wife who could sire him a child.
In 2014, Nora was again up for the Best Actress plum at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Australia) for Hustisya, a political thriller about human trafficking where she plays the offbeat role of a bagwoman in a syndicate who steps into a position of power after her boss loses hers.
Another harvest came a year later when she received three citations for the horror drama Dementia. She won at the St. Tropez International Film Festival (France) and got nominations from the Fantasporo-Oporto International Film Festival (Portugal) and the Soho International Film Festival NYC (New York). In the latter she competed in the gender-neutral Best Performer category.
Even in world cinema, Nora was best-in-class as an artist.
