Best International Film Reviews: Belgium, Pakistan, and Ukraine

by Cláudio Alves

The most wonderful time of the year is upon us. No, not the holiday season. No, not even the awards season as a whole. It's time to delve deep into the submissions for Best International Film before the Academy's committees whittle down the 92 titles to a measly 15-wide shortlist from which the entire voting body will choose its five nominees. The list will be made public on December 21st, so until then, we shall explore the race's offerings, from its major contenders to more obscure selections. To start things off, let's look into three titles that feel bound to make the shortlist, both for reasons of quality, reputation, and international controversy…

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International Feature Race - Part 1. The Numbers, Genres, and Trivia

by Nathaniel R

Can "Decision to Leave" become the second nominee from South Korea?

We can no longer wait around twiddling our thumbs for the Academy's official press releases. AMPAS used to be so prompt with the Best International Feature Film category. In the past few years they've dropped the ball. The deadline for submission was six weeks ago and though Academy members have already been screening the films for a month there's still no press release from AMPAS about the "official list". If they continue this unfortunate new habit that means that nearly a hundred films each year will fail to get two months of media attention that they fully deserve before most of them are eliminated. The Academy will narrow down this year's 92 accepted submissions to just 15 on December 21st (barely a month away). And from those 15 they'll announce the 5 nominees on January 24th. You can see the current predictions here and the full charts detailing all 92 contenders. We assume that Malta's entry, Carmen, was not accepted due to too much English language since it's the only submission from our research that's not on their screening list. 

Anyway, if you smoosh all 92 films together into one imaginary film you'd get something like the following:

A family drama, with a political angle (and probably involving immigration of some kind), which comes from a early to mid-career director who is still rising. The film will be trilingual with dialogue in Arabic, French, and Spanish. It will be 107 minutes long. 

We'll adjust the following stats and trivia IF Oscar's official press release begs to differ by a film or two (which sometimes happens) whenever it arrives. Or maybe they just won't release it this year? So Let's talk stats, trivia, genres, and themes...

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Review: Skolimowski's "EO" is a miracle!

by Cláudio Alves

Can donkeys dream of heaven? One hopes so, for they need not search for hell in sleepy fantasy – they live it every day, wide awake. A world defined by human cruelty demands dreams of something better, something beyond the pain. Is it peace, love, a state of joy? Maybe it's red.

EO all starts in red. Bathed in scarlet light, skin touches fur, human hands over the animal's body, a trance-like choreography that's both intimate and public. There's a closeness to these touches that transcends their physical softness, a beauty that's more than mere performance for circus audiences – it's that heaven we spoke about, but maybe it's hell, too. Red will linger, a memory, perhaps a reverie. Dreams are nightmares by another name, and so is EO, both nightmare and dream right from the beginning…

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Streaming: Argentina’s Oscar Submission ‘Argentina, 1985’

By Abe Friedtanzer

One of the benefits of screening selections for Best International Feature is not only to see different worldwide approaches to filmmaking but also to get to understand national histories. European entries, for instance, often engage with the Holocaust, while a finalist from a few years ago, Truth and Justice, was based on a highly influential book in Estonia known throughout that country. Argentina, 1985, now streaming on Amazon Prime, confronts a more recent period in that nation’s history, documenting an unprecedented reckoning with the crimes of its military leaders in a trailblazing civil case.

Ricardo Darín, a familiar face from Argentinian cinema and its recent nominees, The Secret in their Eyes and Wild Tales, stars as Julio César Strassera, the lead prosecutor in the Trial of the Juntas. It was an undesirable assignment given the extraordinary influence of the military dictatorship that had only recently been replaced by a new democratic government...

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"Joyland" banned in Pakistan. Can it still compete at the Oscars?

by Nathaniel R

Saim Sadiq (via Instagram, left) and a memorable shot from his feature debut "Joyland" (right)

Censorship has been part of the history of art forever. The ways in which we think of censorship in Hollywood cinema usually involve ratings boards or production codes... self-censorship from the industry to prevent outside censorship from the government. It's less a case of banning art than an attempt to keep storytellers in line with accepted norms, however conservative those norms might be in their time. When the story of censorship visibly collides with the Oscar race, though, it's usually across the border and in the Best International Feature Film category. Now we have another of those stories via Pakistan's Oscar submission Joyland. 

The movie, a brilliant feature debut from 31 year old filmmaker Saim Sadiq, is a drama about a young husband in Lahore who falls for a trans performer after being hired by a local dance theater. It first came to international attention when it premiered at Cannes (the first Pakistani movie to do so) and won both Un Certain Regard and the Queer Palm. Just a week before its premiere in Pakistan its release was denied, endangering its Oscar run.  Questions naturally crop out like "Why would a country submit a film and then ban it?" and "Can it still compete?" so let's answer those...

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