As a quick perusal of The Film Verdict’s Oscar coverage shows, the Academy Awards are no longer an exclusively or even a mostly American thing. With our reviews, interviews and profiles, we have tried to capture the world-wide excitement of filmmakers and producers competing for Best International Feature Film, with entries coming from the 92 countries that submitted a hopeful in the category. That’s just short of last year’s record of 93 submissions (Russia boycotted the Awards this year due to wartime tensions with the U.S.)
But beyond the revamped International Feature category, we can easily predict there will be a flurry of influence from beyond the U.S. infiltrating the Academy’s main categories. It’s hard to imagine The Banshees of Inisherin, the unforgettable allegory about civil war by acclaimed British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, not getting nominations in multiple categories, or Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis being overlooked. And international acting talent like Michelle Yeoh (Everything Everywhere All at Once), Nina Hoss (Tár) and possibly Vicky Krieps (Corsage) look strongly positioned. And how about putting Living, the British film based on Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese screenplay, in the Best Adapted Screenplay competition?
Five Remarkable Films – Our Top Picks
As far as critical consensus goes (always difficult to determine, because critics see different films), TFV reviewers converge on five films that have left a deep mark: Close, The Quiet Girl, Joyland, Saint Omer and Argentina, 1985. These are works we believe have the power and urgency to be real contenders in the International category. Young director Lukas Dhont touches the heart in the Belgian film Close, a gut-wrenching tragedy that exposes social attitudes towards violence and same-sex friendship in its story of two 13-year-old boys. This beautiful and delicate film won a Grand Prix in Cannes. The Quiet Girl is no less haunting. Irish writer-director Colm Bairead shot his first feature film with mostly Gaelic dialogue and began winning prizes at Berlin. It is the deeply moving story of a 9-year-old girl who spends a summer with foster parents and unravels a painful truth.
Joyland is the first Pakistani film to screen at Cannes, where it won the jury prize in Un Certain Regard. It is also full of shocking secrets and hidden feelings that make this deft tragi-comedy with its touchingly human protagonist engrossing from start to finish. Director Saim Sadiq uses the story of a poor married man who falls for a glamorous trans dancer to illuminate the destructive nature of the patriarchy on the lives of men and women who challenge its narrow norms.
French director Alice Diop’s first fiction film, Saint Omer, is a stylistic tour-de-force that explores the dark side of motherhood and racism. Centered on the trial for infanticide of a Senegalese woman living in France, it leaves the viewer with no choice but to emphasize and reason along with the two female leads. It premiered in Venice, where it won the Silver Lion, as well as the best first film prize.
Among the many fine films from Latin America this year, we choose Argentina, 1985. Another courtroom drama, directed by Santiago Mitre, it depicts a key moment in Argentina’s (indeed, South America’s) political history with the Trial of the Juntas, in which a civil court led by a determined public prosecutor (played by Ricardo Darín from The Secret in Their Eyes) put army generals and their dictatorship-era crimes on trial. Attesting to its wide appeal, the film won the Fipresci film critics’ prize in Venice and the Audience Award in San Sebastian.
More Films We Loved
Alongside these pathfinders were many more titles worthy of making the International Best Feature Film short list. Other noteworthy films from Latin America include Mexican master Alejandro González Iñárritu’s fantasy-autobiography Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, a visually stunning work that feels just a tad self-indulgent, and director Laura Mora’s Kings of the Road from Colombia, a social film both dreamlike and melodramatic, neorealist and imbued with its own magic realism.
Among the films we believe have a strong chance of making the shortlist are Mario Martone’s Italian entry Nostalgia, a psychological mystery set in the oldest, most atmospheric part of Naples, and Park Chan-wook’s sophisticated thriller and love story, the South Korean Decision to Leave. Another film with a lot of story and drama backing up its movingly authentic portrait of struggling Iranians is Houman Seyyedi’s dark psychological thriller World War III, where a simple day worker on a film set is conscripted to play Hitler in a Holocaust picture, with catastrophic consequences.
This is a time of great tension and suffering in Ukraine, and Maryna Er Gorbach’s gloriously photographed Klondike reflects war in the Donbas in all its terror. German director and screenwriter Edward Berger is another likely finalist with his impassioned German-language adaptation (the first) of Erich Maria Remarque’s timeless anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front.
On a lighter note, two gorgeous looking historical pictures painted memorable portraits of the era. Empress Elisabeth of Austria is seen from a new perspective in writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage, a playful feminist remix of the Sissi story starring rocketing Euro-star Vicky Krieps, while Czech director Petr Vaclav brought to life composer Josef Myslivecek, whose divine music was obscured by the brilliance his friend Mozart, in the romantic and visually stunning Il Boemo.
A shortlist nod is very probable for Poland’s entry EO, a heartfelt salute to Robert Bresson’s film classic Au Hazard, Balthazar and the brutal treatment of a donkey, from 83-year-old Polish master Jerzy Skolimowski. It has impassioned audiences (both pro and con) since its prize-winning debut at Cannes. Carla Simón’s immersive Spanish drama Alcarràs about a family of Catalan peach growers who remain united in trouble won the Golden Bear at Berlin. The Dutch submission Narcosis directed by Martijn de Jong is an impressive work that poetically describes a shattering domestic tragedy; it won four awards at the Nederlands Film Festival including Best Film.
Also very poetic is the Swiss entry A Piece of Sky; director Michael Koch’s beautifully shot story is set in a remote farming community high in the Alps. And from North Africa comes one of our favorite films in the line-up, Maryam Touzani’s multiple award-winning drama The Blue Caftan. Set in a splendid Moroccan medina, it tells the deeply moving love story between a wife and (only she knows) her secretly gay husband.
All these intriguing works point to the ever-rising influence of film festivals as world showcases able to bring standout titles to people’s attention, and the importance of a film winning major festival awards as an almost obligatory stepping stone to national submission. The 15 films on the International Best Feature Film short list will be announced on Dec. 21.
The Film Verdict now boasts 13 reviewers from around the world, whose critical talents and pungent writing have set the standards: Deborah Young (Rome), Stephen Dalton (London), Jay Weissberg (Rome), Boyd Van Hoeij (Luxembourg), Jordan Mintzer (Paris), Oris Aigbokhaevbolo (Lagos), Clarence Tsui (Hong Kong), Ben Nicholson (London), Carmen Gray (Berlin), Kevin Jagernauth (Montreal) and our Cine Verdict team Patricia Boero (Punta del Este), Lucy Virgen (Guadalajara) and Leonardo Garcia Tsao (Mexico City). And feature writer Max Borg!
