The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
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Friday, October 9, 2020 at 11:20AM by Nathaniel R
Beginning
We have three more official submissions for Best International Feature Film at the forthcoming Oscars, bringing the number up to nine, and one of them is streaming on Netflix for your pleasure or cathartic misery as the case may be...
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 at 12:06PM by Nathaniel R
Spain has been chasing Oscars in the Best International Feature category since the very first year of the category's existence. They've been quite successful at it, too, with the third highest nomination count of any country (after France and Italy). The Academia de las Artes y las Ciencias Cinematográficas de España reportedly considered 58 Spanish films this year and though we'd heard they weren't choosing their three finalists until October 10th, word is going around that they've made the decision a bit early and it's these three films as the finalist for the submission honor. In early November they'll choose which will be their submission to the Oscars...
Sunday, September 27, 2020 at 6:00PM Our coverage of the New York Film Festival -- you can buy virtual tickets to most of these films -- continues.
by Nathaniel R
The prison movie is its own specific subgenre, holding close to its own tropes, structural familiarity, and character types. Though we've never been imprisoned, we imagined these are culled from reality as much as imagined from collective nightmare. As a general rule, we long for escape from well worn genres, but in some cases it's useful shorthand. Such it is with Philippe LaCôte's Night of Kings, the buzzy Ivory Coast Oscar submission which we suspect might have been too confusing to resonate for Western audiences, were if not for these familiar, even universal, elements...
Thursday, September 24, 2020 at 2:52PM by Nathaniel R
The Ukrainian Oscar committee has announced the country's submission for Best International Feature contest at the forthcoming Academy Awards. They will be sending Atlantis by 49 year-old rising director Valentyn Vasyanovych, which is a near-future drama about a former soldier in a decaying country. The soldier volunteers to help exhume war corpses. It's said to be an ambitious work with a reportedly riveting lead performance from film newcomer Andriy Rymaruk...
Friday, September 18, 2020 at 11:57PM by Nathaniel R
We've already told you about submissions from Ivory Coast, Poland, and Switzerland. Now we have a fourth contender for the Best International Feature Oscar. We suspect in the end that there won't be as many entries as usual (the list usually reaches about 90 films) due to the chaos of the pandemic but you never know.
Bhutan will be sending Lunana A Yak in the Classroom by 37 year-old photographer turned first time director Pawo Choyniing Dorji. It's about a young man who is assigned to teach school children in a remote village in the Himalayas but doesn't want to be there (at first). This is only the second submission from the small landlocked country which is located on the southern border of Tibet. Their film industry only began in the 1990s but produces multiple films per year and is reportedly growing quickly. Given their output, we expect they'll start submitting more frequently since the neighboring countries that influence their cinema (Nepal, Bangladesh, China, Tibet, and especially India) all submit regularly. Their first submission was the feel-good film The Cup (1999) about soccer-obsessed monks in the Himalayas.
