The International Oscar submissions: Around the world in a thousand minutes
By Liam Lacey
Ongoing travel restrictions mean we won’t stroll the streets of Budapest or Tokyo anytime soon. But there’s some consolation in enjoying your own lockdown global film festival, watching Oscar-contending foreign films, home-streaming this month.
These releases are part of the lead-up to the Academy Awards’ Feb. 9 announcement of its short-list of the top 10 from a record 93 Best International Picture submissions.
A scene from Latvia’s WWI drama Blizzard of Souls.
The Oscars, in some form, are scheduled for April 25. Film Movement in the U.S. is offering a package of four Oscar-nominated films through its website, with part of the proceeds going to local theatres: Last week, Latvia’s entry, the First World War drama, Blizzard of Souls, came online. Also, Dear Comrades, Russia’s Oscar entry, from Andrey Konchalovskiy debuts on digital TIFF Bell Lightbox Feb. 5.
This Friday, it’s Switzerland’s My Little Sister, starring Nina Hoss. That’s followed by Sudan’s first Oscar submission, You Will Die At 20 (Jan. 22) Naomi Kawase’s Japanese adoption drama, True Mothers (Jan. 29, although, so far, no Canadian theatre has signed on for this last film.)
Other Oscar-nominated films include Indonesia’s horror film, Impetigore (on the streaming service, Shudder) and Serbia’s concentration camp drama, Dara in Jasenovac (Feb. 5). Other recently-released Oscar submissions which we have covered here at Original-Cin include Collective (Romania), Once Upon a Time in Venezuela (Venezuela), and a presumed Oscar favourite, Another Round (Denmark).
A caveat: The Best International Picture category is badly-designed. Instead of picking its own nominations, the Academy outsources them. Each country - whether it produces 1,000 feature films or just one a year - can pick only one official submission to the Oscars, according to its own bureaucratic rules and political priorities.
As well, the Academy self-sabotages by pretending English is not an international language. Last year, two submitted films, Austria’s Joy, and Nigeria’s Lionheart, were excluded for having too much English, even though English is the official language of Nigeria. This year, the axe fell on the Portuguese entry, Listen, and the Canadian entry, Deepa Mehta’s Sri Lankan-drama Funny Boy, for too much English dialogue. (The French-language Quebec film, 14 Days 12 Nights, has been substituted.)
All that calls for a bit of Zen adjustment – a reminder, to come to these films, not as the lofty peaks of international cinema, but for a wider perspective on human struggles around the world.
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Blizzard Of Souls (D. Dzintars Dreibergs) A high-grossing hit in its native country, Blizzard of Souls, based on Aleksandrs Grins’ semi-autobiographical 1922 novel presents the coming-of-age of one teen-aged soldier as his country is over-run by Germany, and then emerging Latvian independence is crushed down by the Russians. The history – a period in which Latvia lost nearly half its population to conflict -- is challenging to follow, but cinematography and editing excel, with harrowing point-of-view battle scenes. Watch on Film Movement.
My Little Sister. (D.Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond) Terrific acting, and a tender but frank approach to the stresses of terminal illness in a family, raise this drama above the level of its functional screenplay and crisp, unfussy direction. Lisa (Nina Hoss) a playwright, returns from her home in Switzerland to be with her actor brother, Sven (Lars Eidinger),who is ill with leukemia. Lisa’s need to be with her brother causes a rift with her husband (Danish actor, Jens Albinus), who is an administrator of a fancy boarding school and wants to keep his wife at home. Hoss is, per usual, compelling as a woman animated with brittle anxiety. And for bonus, there’s Marthe Keller, as the twin’s less than cuddly mother. (Jan. 15).
Watch on Film Movement. Or through TIFF Bell Lightbox.digital screenings.
You Will Die at Twenty. (D. Amjad Abu Alala). First-time director Abu Alala brings visually striking cinematography to this Sudan-set drama, which imbues the story with its heightened sense of fable. The story is like Sleeping Beauty, but with a male protagonist. When his mother takes the boy child Muzamil, to be blessed by the local sheikh, a dervish dancer suddenly falls dead. The sheilk interprets this tragedy as meaning that the boy will die on his twentieth birthday. Muzamil’s father, who can’t take the tension, abandons his family, leaving young Muzamil to be bullied by his peers, and later torn between strict religious Islamic beliefs and the worldly influence of a cynical old-timer, who lives with a local prostitute and drinks illegal alcohol. Philosophically enigmatic, the drama may be an allegory for Sudan’s rejection of its authoritarian past. (Jan. 22)
Watch on Film Movement.
True Mothers (Jan. 29).
A Tokyo couple use an adoption agency to find a baby, whose biological mother later turns up demanding money. Though based on a recent novel, the film features Kawase’s characteristic mixture of family melodrama and radiant nature images. Jumping between time periods, this lengthy film presents us, first in the lives of the childless couple, then the story of the young mother, 14-year-old Hikari. The latter is forced to give up her baby after a stay in a home for unwed mothers on a paradisal island off the coast of Hiroshima. Time jumps again, as Hikari takes up a new life, delivering paper’s in Tokyo, where she befriends a former sex worker and grifter, leading to her confrontation with her child’s new parents. (No Canadian distributor yet).
Natasha Stork in Hungary’s Preparations to Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time.
Preparations to Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time. (D. Lili Horvát) (Jan. 22) Released in Canada by Ron Mann’s Films We Like, this superior Hungarian Oscar entry suggests Hitchcock’s Vertigo from a feminine perspective, not only in its theme of erotic obsession but in the slippery complex of delusion and misdirection. First-time film actress Natasa Stork plays Marta, a cool, super-competent 40-year-old neurosurgeon who returns to her native Budapest from the States, in passionate pursuit of a fellow doctor, János, who she met at a conference. When Marta catches up with the man, a burly inscrutable fellow doctor, he purports not to know her. Against common sense, she decides to stay in Budapest and take a job there, though she takes the precaution of seeing a shrink: Is it possible that, like the patients on whom she operates, she has a problem in her head? Is she crazy in love or just crazy? The ending of this intricately ingenious film with its retro-noir sheen is unexpectedly flat, though even the let-down leaves tantalizing questions. Streaming from Jan 22, via digital TIFF Bell Lightbox
Impetigore (D. Joko Anwar). This juicily gruesome horror film about a cursed village, skinless babies and an evil puppet-master, has about as much chance of winning an Oscar as does Trolls World Tour, though you can’t deny the power of its sticky night jungle atmosphere. Maya is a toll-booth operator who gets attacked by a machete-wielding driver who seems to know who she is and the village she came from. That leads her, and her best friend Dini, to go back to her remote home town a place mysteriously lacking in children and no jugular vein is safe. The film is currently available on the streaming service, Shudder, which has a free trial week.