Semih Kaplanoglu’s Bal / Honey
Some of the 65 movies vying for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar are obvious choices. [List of Oscar 2011 Foreign Language Film Submissions.]
For instance, Semih Kaplanoglu’s Bal / Honey (Turkey) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival; Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thailand) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes; and Igor Sterk’s 9:06 (Slovenia) swept the Slovene Film Festival awards.
Also, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies was chosen Best Canadian Film at the Toronto Film Festival; Biutiful (Mexico) was directed by a world-renowned filmmaker, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and features an international star, Javier Bardem; and Giorgos Lanthimos‘ Dogtooth (Greece) was given the Un Certain Regard Award at Cannes in 2009 (the film opened in Greece in November of that year, thus qualifying it for the 2011 Oscar).
Many others are understandable choices, e.g., Xavier Beauvois‘ Of Gods and Men (France) didn’t win any top awards at Cannes, but was one of the best-received films at the festival;In a Better World (Denmark) was directed by Susanne Bier, whose After the Wedding received a surprising nomination a few years ago; and Javier Fuentes-León’s Undertow (Peru) was the World Cinema Audience Award winner at Sundance.
The most notable curiosity on the list is probably the Brazilian entry.
As mentioned in a previous article, Fábio Barreto’s expensive flop Lula, the Son of Brazil was hardly the best-received Brazilian production released in the past year. Its submission, in fact, caused quite a bit of a stir in that country.
Also, indieWIRE’s Peter Knegt has remarked that Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love, which stars Tilda Swinton, would have been a more obvious Italian choice than Paolo Virzi’s David di Donatello nominee The First Beautiful Thing. But the problem with I Am Love may have been the fact that the Academy has strict rules about the amount of English-language dialogue allowed in a Foreign Language Film submission.
Recently, Israel’s The Band’s Visit was disqualified because of too much English dialogue. Five years ago, Italy’s original submission, Saverio Costanzo’s Private, was disqualified because its dialogue was in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. (Since then the Academy has changed its rules to allow countries to submit films in other languages — except English.)
Another curiosity: Algeria, as usual, is submitting what is mostly a French production, Rachid Bouchareb’s Outside the Law. The director/screenwriter is French-born — of Algerian ancestry — and so is much of the film’s financing.
And finally, missing from the list — as Brad Brevet’s remarks at Rope of Silicon — is Sonia Nassery Cole’s Black Tulip (Afghanistan), a previously announced contender that may not have met the Academy’s release date requirements.
Nine semi-finalists in the Best Foreign Language Film category will be announced on January 20, 2011. The final list of nominees will come out five days later.