Paula van der West

Paula van der Oest (born 1965) is a Dutch film director and screenwriter. Her 2001 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 (Achilles and the Zebracrossing). With the former, she won a Golden Calf for the best television drama. In 1996 van der Oest made her first long movie: De nieuwe moeder (The New Mother). Her husband at the time, Theu Boermans, had a role in this movie (later, he would also have a role in Zus & Zo). De Trip Van Teetje (The Journey Of 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 film in 2001. The realistic characters and the relations among the individuals from her former movies remained central, but there was more humour added, resulting in an Oscar nomination