Pt 2: International Feature Race - Auteur Spotlight

by Nathaniel R

SOUTH KOREA's Park Chan Wook & Lee Byung Hun [image via Lee Byung hun's Instagram]

To broaden your appreciation of this year's Best International Feature Film Oscar race we already looked at some overall trivia. Before we get to the movie stars (the finale of this three-parter), let's look at some stats involving the artists behind the camera. It's auteur season! We're highlighting 8 directors due to their critical reputation, being a cinephile fetish object, or having previous Oscar history... or in some cases all three! We'll start with...

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• Park Chan-wook (South Korea's No Other Choice) 
Remarkably this 62 year-old auteur and Academy member has only been submitted twice by South Korea  despite a rich filmography...

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International Contenders: Will we get a repeat Nominee?

by Nathaniel R

Roughly 34% of Oscar's Best International Feature hopefuls (thus far) come from debut filmmakers so it feels like we're headed for an "emerging filmmaker" kind of year at the Oscars (and not just in this category). But while the 2020 competition is likely to favor fresh blood statistically, eight countries have submitted famous directors who've made it to the nomination list already... or almost made it in two of the cases.

They are...

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Chi Film Fest: "Charlatan" an Oscar Submission

Coverage from the 56th annual Chicago Film Festival running October 14 - 25. 

by Nick Taylor

It takes a while for Charlatan, the newest film by Agnieszka Holland and the Czech Republic’s Oscar submission for Best International Feature this year, to get its feet under itself. The semi-fictionalized story of renowned Czech herbalist and healer Jan Mikolášek (played by Ivan Trojan for most of the film and by Josef Trojan, his son, as a young man), Charlatan opens with the death of president Antonín Zápotocký in 1957. With his biggest political ally and former patient gone, Mikolášek is warned to flee the Czech Republic before he's arrested by the Communist party. He refuses, either because he’s too bullishly stubborn or too self-flagellating, and is soon arraigned with his assistant František Palko (Juraj Loj) on death penalty-level charges that his lawyer proves are a sham with little investigation. The party doesn’t if the case is strong, or even real, as long as he’s executed. 

The film jumps between this scenario and following Mikolášek’s beginnings as a soldier in World War I, his training with a local herbalist named Mülbacherová (Jaroslava Pokorná), and the formation of his practice with František. Charlatan delineating these timelines with a color tint heavy enough to satisfy anyone who found the dual threads in Little Women difficult to track...

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More International Submissions including Agnieszka Holland's "Charlatan"

by Nathaniel R

We're up to 14 announced submissions for this year's Best International Feature Oscar so those submission charts are updated with the following films added

• Algeria - Héliopolis 
• Czech Republic - Charlatan
• Ecuador - Emptiness
• Kosovo - Exile
• Singapore - Wet Season

We've only had the pleasure of seeing one of these five newly announced titles so far, Wet Season (which was a Golden Horse nominee last year). I liked it at TIFF in 2019 though I thought it erred on the side of being too much of a "slow burn" if you know what I mean. But a year later I'll admit that I think of it surprisingly frequently so even though I was a thumbs up, I underestimated it! It's an emotionally complicated story of an unhappy teacher who becomes way too involved with the life of her lonely student (they're pictured above). 

But back to the submissions, of the 14 films we know about so far 6 are from female directors! How about that? One of those female directors is a regular, in point of fact...

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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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