"My Little Sister" and Switzerland at the Oscars

by Nathaniel R

We have our second contender for Best International Feature at the forthcoming Oscars. Poland was first to announce but now we also know which film Switzerland will send. They're going with My Little Sister which stars two familiar German greats Nina Hoss (Phoenix, Barbara, A Most Wanted Man) and Lars Eidinger (Never Look Away, Personal Shopper, Clouds of Sils Maria). Hoss and Eidinger are only six months apart in age in real life and early reviews of their performances are strong so we can't wait to see them as twins. The movie is directed by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond, a directing duo that Switzerland submitted once before in 2010 for The Little Bedroom...

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Poland's Oscar stats and the first 2020 news of the International Feature Race

If you've been reading TFE for any length of time, you already know we're obsessive about Oscar's Foreign Language Film race, last year retitled to Best International Feature Film. Normally we've long since begun talking about the submission list, but 2020 remains an unruly unusual beast. But we do have two pieces of news to share regarding our favourite non-actress based category.

First, we've neglected to mention that Oscar's longer-than-usual release eligibility period has also affected Best International Film...

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Spain's big mistake

by Cláudio Alves

Throughout the recent awards season, I wrote several pieces about the Best International Feature race, an Oscar category that's very dear to my heart. It's also a source of endless frustration for I am Portuguese and Portugal remains the country that holds the record for most submissions without getting a single Oscar nomination. To be fair, that's not always the Academy's fault. Sometimes, the choice submission is so mind-bogglingly misguided, it kills any hope of a nomination the minute it's announced. It's not always that the submitted films are lacking in quality, but, sometimes they're productions that were little seen outside of Portugal and received no buzz whatsoever.

This is by no means a strictly Portuguese problem, mind you. In fact, since we're celebrating the 2002 movie year, it seems like a good time to explore one of Spain's most misjudged bits of Oscar selection…

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Review: Don't miss "And Then We Danced"

by Cláudio Alves

A man is a monument of strength, hard and unbending. A woman is a vision of purity, soft and willowy. For those who teach Georgian traditional dance, this binary is tantamount to a universal truth whose cosmic certainty must be supported by the choreographed bodies. But binaries are conventions fated to be broken by the messiness of being human. Merab, the protagonist of Levan Akin's And Then We Danced, is the element of humanity that breaks the convention and exposes its brittle frailty.

Merab's too soft to be a monument. He's too willowy to be the man of folkloric tradition. He's still a man, though, and a dancer too, one that trains to be part of the National Georgian Ensemble...

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Best International Feature: Vietnam, United Kingdom & Singapore's contenders

by Cláudio Alves

The Oscar shortlists are almost here. On December 16th, we'll finally know which are the 10 films that go forward in the race for the Best International Feature award. To whittle down the record-breaking number of 91 submissions into a sparse 10 won't be an easy feat and there are bound to be many snubs causing controversy and discussion among Oscar buffs. While we wait for that most anticipated date, I invite you to continue our adventure through those 91 submissions. This time around, we're focusing on films that are currently available on Netflix.

There's Vietnam's story of a vengeful mother in search of her kidnapped daughter; the UK's tale of human perseverance in Malawi; and Singapore's oneiric reveries about disappeared drivers and insomniac detectives…

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