Emilia Pérez is a 2024 genre-defying film written and directed by Jacques Audiard, the French filmmaker behind A Prophet and Rust and Bone. Shot entirely in Spanish — a language Audiard does not natively speak — the film blends Mexican cartel thriller, sung musical, and gender-transformation drama into a single, deliberately hybrid form that resists easy categorization. At its center is a cartel kingpin who arranges her own death, undergoes gender reassignment surgery to begin a new life as Emilia Pérez, and finds that escaping one identity does not erase the moral weight of the other.

The film stars Karla Sofía Gascón in the title role, opposite Zoe Saldaña as Rita Mora, the criminal defense lawyer enlisted to facilitate the transformation and disappearance. Selena Gomez plays the cartel boss's abandoned wife, and Adriana Paz rounds out the principal cast as a woman Emilia connects with in her new life. All four actresses jointly received the Best Actress prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival — an unprecedented collective award that reflected Audiard's insistence that the performances were too deeply interdependent to single out any one of them.

Emilia Pérez received 13 Academy Award nominations — the most of any non-English language film in Oscar history — and won four, including Best Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldaña and Best Original Song for the number "El Mal." Karla Sofía Gascón became the first openly transgender actress nominated for Best Actress. The film also won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize and became one of Netflix's most-discussed international releases of 2024, praised for its formal boldness and divisive for its approach to its subject matter.