China submits "Leap" to the Oscars

by Nathaniel R

China has submitted the women's volleyball drama Leap to the Oscars, which is already streaming on Amazon Prime. Gong Li headlines but you'd barely recognize her she's so unglamorous this time. The 55 year old superstar has recently returned to the screen after taking a few years off, and its' going pretty well. She's the flashiest thing about Disney's Mulan and now she's headlining her seventh Oscar submission in the International category. We already discussed China's Oscar history but how about Gong Li's history starring in Oscar hopefuls? Here they are...

Click to read more ...

"Better Days" and China & Hong Kong at the Oscars

by Nathaniel

Hong Kong has selected Better Days (available to rent on Amazon), to represent them at the 93rd Oscars. Its director Derek Tsang (also known as Tsang Kwok Cheung) first entered the movies as an actor. But for the last decade the now 41 year old talent has been moving behind the camera. (He's the son of the director Eric Tsang who followed a similar path working both sides of the camera). His film is a contemporary crime drama about a bullied teenage girl and a mysterious thug who protects her. It won 8 prizes at the annnual Hong Kong Film Awards.

The Academy Awards have been notoriously resistant to Asian cinema, apart from a 20th century fixation on Japan. Most Asian countries have somewhere between zero to two Oscar nominations, usually not a number that accurately reflects their status in global cinema. Only in the 1990s when Chinese cinema was all the rage at US arthouses, did Oscar come around and then only for a few short years. After the jump at look at China and Hong Kong's track record with Oscar. We're grouping them together, despite how problematic that is politically, because when it comes to the film industries it can be hard to separate them for us Americans across the ocean. That's because the two countries often share the same directors and movie stars. That's reflected in their Oscar submissions... 

Click to read more ...

More International Contenders including a Student Academy Award Winner!

Since the last roundup the following countries have been added to the list of contenders for this year's Best International Feature Film race bringing our total to 77 contenders.

• Argentina -The Sleepwalkers
• Armenia - Songs of Solomon
• Bolivia - Chaco
• Egypt - When We're Born (a musical!) 
• Hungary - Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time (Hungary & Oscar)
• India - Jallikattu (streaming on Prime)
• Ireland - Arracht
• Italy - Notturno (Reviewed | Italy & Oscar) 
• Lebanon - Broken Keys (more on this one below)
• Philippines - Mindanao
• Thailand - Happy Old Year (streaming on Netflix)

You can follow the list as it grows at our Oscar charts or on our Letterboxd list.  

Jimmy Keyrouz. Photographed by Christophe Meireis.

One of fun trivia items about this new batch is that Jimmy Keyrouz, the 32 year old behind Lebanon's Broken Keys actually has Oscar history. He won a Student Academy Award for his short Nocturne in Black four years ago. That short didn't end up getting Oscar-nominated, but he made the finalist list. Now his first feature, about a pianist struggling to repair his piano in a town where terrorists have banned music, is submitted by his home country. How about that? Congratulations! 

If you want to watch the submissions, 12 of the 77 titles are streaming.

 India's Jallikattu is on Amazon Prime, Guatemala's La Llorona is on Amazon, Indonesia's Impetigore is on Shudder or Roku, Lithuania's Nova Lituania is on MUBI, South Korea's Man Standing Next is on Amazon, YouTube, or iTunes, and Chile's The Mole Agent on Hulu. Netflix has the other six currently available titles: Austria's What We Wanted, Mexico's I'm No Longer Here, Spain's The Endless Trench, Taiwan's A Sun, Turkey's Miracle in Cell No 7, and Thailand's Happy Old Year. 

Click to read more ...

Review: Henry Golding in "Monsoon"

by Allen Nguyen

Henry Golding was eight years old when he and his family left Malaysia for England. Director Hong Khaou (Lilting) was an infant when his family fled the Khmer Rouge for Vietnam. That shared experience of displacement-fueled ambiguity and the concept of reconciling one’s national identity is the foundation on which the new film Monsoon is built.   

Golding plays Kit, a British-Vietnamese man who returns to the country he and his family fled some thirty years prior. Kit cannot speak Vietnamese, has cloudy childhood memories of life in Vietnam, and is unable to process the unfamiliarity of the land he once called home...

Click to read more ...

International Contenders Update

Since the last round up 6 more countries have announced Oscar submissions bringing the total of competing films to 43.

 

• BELGIUM - Working Girls  A drama about three women from France crossing the border daily to Belgium for sex work
• INDONESIA - Impetigore (previously discussed) Usually there's a random horror movie somewhere in the submission list but this year we have not one but two Asian horror movies (the other is Roh/Soul from Malaysia). The only horror movie we can think of to be successfully nominated in this category was a very long time ago with Japan's Kwaidan (1964). 
• IRAN - Sun Children (previously discussed) 
• KENYA - The Letter This is the first time Kenya has submitted a documentary (the nomination for Honeyland last year seems to have embolded various countries to send docs as it looks like there will be more of them than usual this year)
• LESOTHO -This is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection First submission from this country! It's one of only three independent states on earth that are entirely surrounded by another single country (in this case South Africa) -- they call them "enclaved countries", so it's the first submission from any enclaved country actually (the others are San Marino and Vatican City). The film is about an 80 year old woman who fights the construction of a reservoir in her village
• TURKEY - Miracle in Cel No 7  This is a loose remake of a South Korean film of the same name about a mentally disabled man who is wrongly imprisoned. The original is just 7 years old and it's already been remade by Turkey, The Philippines, and Indonesia.

More details on the Oscar charts and also a visual overview of the whole field at Letterboxd