Italy's choice for this year's Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award is Emanuele Crialese's Nuovomondo / The Golden Door, winner of several prizes at this year's Venice Film Festival, including a Silver Lion Revelation Award. Nuovomondo, or "New World," follows a number of Sicilians who want to emigrate to the United States.
The film, which stars Charlotte Gainsbourg and Vincenzo Amato, has been picked for obvious reasons. (And here's wondering how many Italian films have been made about the millions of Italians who emigrated to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina.)
Russia has picked Fyodor Bondarchuk's 9-ya rota / The 9th Company, the story of an army unit sent to Afghanistan to fight mujahadeen guerrillas. Made with a budget of US$9 million, 9-ya rota became a major box-office hit in its home country. Sergei Bodrov's Kavkazskiy plennik / Prisoner of the Mountains, another Russian film depicting another of Russia's deadly war follies (the war against Muslim rebels — read Chechens and associates — in the Caucasus region) was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1996.
Fyodor, by the way, is the son of Sergei Bondarchuk, whose lengthy adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace (1965-67) is considered one of the masterworks of Russian cinema.
Nuovomondo was much better than the film that got the Academy award nominatione.