For more than two decades, New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro has built a career that has swung between breakout indie success and the upper echelons of studio filmmaking.

She first drew international attention with Whale Rider, a small, community-rooted drama that became a global phenomenon and earned Keisha Castle-Hughes an Oscar nomination. Caro followed with North Country (2005) for Warner Bros., The Zookeepers Wife (2017) for Focus, and then the biggest leap of her career: Directing Disneys live-action Mulan (2020), which was shot across continents and budget tiers and became one of the pandemic-eras most scrutinised studio releases. Most recently she helmed the Jennifer Lopez thriller The Mother (2023) for Netflix, a hit for the streamer. This year she steps into a different spotlight: Heading the main jury at the Camerimage Film Festival in Toru, Poland, the industrys most influential event dedicated to cinematography. It is a conspicuous appointment, coming a year after Camerimage faced intense criticism over the gender imbalance in its official lineup. While the festival is taking steps to address the issue, this years competition lineup remains disproportionately male, which just 3 female DPs represented out of the 13 titles up for the 2025 Golden Frog for best film.

Caro is blunt about the trend she sees across the industry, far beyond one festival. You can just see it statistically, she says. Less female cinematographers are shooting films. Less female directors are directing films. So when you see those numbers ticking down, not ticking up, theyre going in the opposite direction. Theyre going the wrong direction, and its quite depressing.

Caro has long run female-heavy departments, including on Mulan. All the [head of department roles], except for the production designer, were female, she says. You get a bunch of girls running a show like that, everybodys communicating, everybodys organized. Theres no bullshit.

The problem, she stresses, is not the absence of talent but the absence of chances. Theres a tremendous lack of opportunity for the new ones to come through. And so the ones that do break through have a strength of character that you should never underestimate. If the system is regressing, she says, the artists are not: Do not underestimate the brilliance and the tenacity of these artists.

Caro is quick to point out that neither gender or dogma will shape her choices as jury president. She heads up a three-woman, two-man jury, which includes cinematographers Jos Luis Alcaine (Volver, Pain and Glory) and Ellen Kuras (Lee, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), actor Tim Blake Nelson (Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, Watchmen) and producer Sabrina Sutherland (Twin Peaks, Inland Empire).

Were all judging the films through the lens, of cinematography, she says. For me as a director, the main question is: Does the cinematography, the choices that are made behind the camera, help to tell the story, are they telling the story the right way, and is it moving the audience?

Across her career, Caro has worked at nearly every scale of production. She describes Mulan as a moment when the complexity and ambition multiplied quickly. When I first read it, I was like, Holy shit, this is huge. And then it just got huger. Working with cinematographer Mandy Walker, she says, required meticulous planning, so that when we got to set, we could just fly. She remembers the shoot as a really exhilarating experience with the cameras on the cranes just flying around.

But big-studio visibility also meant public scrutiny. She says she was aware of the cultural pressures around Mulan, both the weight of the legend of Mulan, and the expectations of Disneys global audience, but no amount of preparation anticipated the pandemic derailing Disneys theatrical plans. There were other things at large at the time, not the least of them being the pandemic and the movie not screening theatrically, which was incredibly difficult.

Working in the streaming era has brought its own adaptations. Her Netflix thriller The Mother skipped theaters but reached one of the services largest global audiences. As somebody who has kind of come up through independent film, [it] just took my breath away to understand how many people were watching this film, she says. Regretfully, she notes, its becoming rarer and rarer to be able to see smaller films on big screens.

Between jury duties in Toru, Caro is deep into development on several personal projects, including a New Zealand-set adaptation she describes as spiritually linked to her breakthrough feature. Ive optioned a couple of books. One of them is a a novel by a first-time New Zealand author [A Beautiful Family by Jennifer Trevelyan] and it feels to me like a companion movie to Whale Rider.

Set New Zealands Kpiti Coast in 1985, A Beautiful Family and narrated by ten-year-old Alix, who befriends 12-year-old Mori boy Kahu and embarks on a search for a girl presumed drowned two years earlier.

The character Alix is Pkeh, shes European, not Mori [as in Whale Rider],says Caro, but I feel like the two films are sort of holding hands across my career. With the script pretty much ready, Caro is currently casting the project. After years of taking on large-scale studio films that arrived fully packaged, she says the return to building something small and personal from the ground up has been energizing. To be able to develop and nurture these smaller films from seeds is really nice. Its very hands on. Feels very bespoke.

The 33rd Camerimage Film Festival runs Nov. 1523 in Toru, Poland.