by Nathaniel R
THE HOLE IN THE FENCE
Mexico has chosen their Oscar submission finalist list. We'd do a whole huge post on it but we suspect by the time we did they'd have named their winner and despite divisive reviews thus far we suspect they won't be able to resist sending Iñarritu again. As it stands now they're looking at three films we've already reviewed here at TFE: Alejandro G Iñarritu's Bardo (False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths), Lorenz Vigas' very dark father/son drama The Box, and Joaquin del Paso's allegorical summer camp drama The Hole in the Fence. The other two they're looking at are the sexual drama Nudo Mixteco by Angeles Cruz and the thriller Presencias by Luis Mandoki. Among those filmmakers Inarritu (Biutiful, Amores Perros) and Mandoki (Innocent Voices) have represented Mexico before while Vigas's debut film, the gay drama From Afar, was sent to represent Venezuela in its year.
But that's not all. We now know which films Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Turkey,and Uganda are submitting. Details after the jump...
🇨🇷 DOMINGO AND THE MIST (Ariel Escalante)
COSTA RICA (no results yet from 11 submissions)
This drama revolves around a widower whose dead wife visits him in the mist. The title though refers to the town Domingo rather than the man. A developer wants its current inhabitants out for the construction of a highway. Escalante was previously submitted for his film The Sound of Things (2017) so now he is one of two Costa Rican directors who have represented the country twice -- the other is Esteban Ramirez (Caribe, Presos) -- though Costa Rica is still waiting on its first nomination.
🇨🇿 IL BOEMO (PETR VACLAV)
CZECH REPUBLIC (3 nominations, 1 win, and 2 additional finalists from 29 submissions)
From their list of finalists they've chosen this 18th century biopic which is about the composer/violniist Josef Myslivecek (played by actor/musician Vojtech Dyk). The drama centers on his relationship with a hedonistic woman and a comission to write a new opera. (The former Czechoslovakia became two countries, Czech Republic and Slovakia, and they both submit independently now. When they were together they submitted 23 times resulting in 6 nominations and 2 wins, 1 of the wins being in Slovak and the others in Czech)
🇹🇷 KERR (Tayfun Pirselimoglu)
TURKEY (never nominated, 1 finalist from 29 submissions)
We hope this is good as we are quite sad they didn't choose the award winning Burning Days which we were eager to see given the buzz for the political drama which also had a gay element. Yes, maybe we'll still get a chance to see that one but it's a truth rarely acknowledged that even the act of Oscar submission (even when no nomination follows) often helps films become more widely circulated. The film they are submitting is a thriller about a man who witnesses a murder so he can't leave town. Neither can anyone else as a quarantine is called.
🇺🇬 TEMBELE (Morris Mugisha)
UGANDA (no statististics yet - FIRST SUBMISSION!)
This one is about a garbage truck worker who loses his son. IMDb says that the film is in English. The Academy has loosened their rules somewhat on the topic of language (allowing pidgin languages derived from English due to complaints about some African films being declared ineligible in the past) but we don't yet know if this one will actually qualify.
Updated Oscar Charts
Pg 1 - Albania through Greece - 10 official entries and 3 finalist lists
Pg 2 - Haiti through Norway - 4 official entries and 2 finalist lists
Pg 3 - Palestine through Vietnam - 11 official entries and 5 finalist lists
Current Predictions