Ukraine submits "Atlantis" and Bosnia submits "Quo Vadis, Aida?"
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...
It won the top prize from the Orrizonti section at Venice last year and our own Glenn Dunks loved it at the Melbourne Filme Festival. This submission makes Vasyanovych tied with Oles Sanin (Mamay, The Guide) as Ukraine's "Most Submitted Director". Vasyanovych was previously submitted in 2017 for his film Black Level. This is his fourth film. It was released in early November 2019 in Ukraine, making it basically the oldest film they could have selected for this honor. The 2019 International Feature submission cutoff last season (Parasite won of course) was September 30th, 2019. So anything released after October 1st, 2019 in any country would be technically eligible for home country submission for 2020 (provided it wasn't released in 2019 in the US of course).
The other new submission is Quo Vadis, Aida? from Bosnia and Herzegovina. It's about a UN translator (Jasna Djuricic) in a small town. When the Serbian army takes over the town her family is one of thousands seeking shelter in the UN camp. (You might recall that our Italian correspondant Elisa loved the lead actress in Venice). The film is directed by Jasmila Zbanic. You might have heard of Zbanic's debut feature Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams which was well received internationally back in 2006 and was also submitted by Bosnia for the Oscar competition.
Cool Trivia Note: There have now been six films submitted for Best International Feature and already half of them are by female filmmakers!!!
Other Finalists and Stats
Three finalists were named before Ukraine's submission selection was made, all of them prize winners at various festivals. The other two were My Thoughts Are Silent which is a feature debut of a young filmmaker named Antonio Lukich. The prize-winning dramedy is about a sound engineer who is tasked with capturing the voice of a rare mountain-dwelling bird. The final contender was the documentary The Earth Is Blue as an Orange from another young filmmaker Iryna Tsilyk. She took the world cinema documentary directing prize at Sundance in January for this film.
Ukraine's Oscar Stats
Submitting since 1997
12 Total Submissions
Never Nominated
Statistical Caveat: The former Soviet Union, which submitted films from 1963 through 1991 scored 9 Oscar nominations with 3 wins. All but three of their submissions were in the Russian language and the only one of those non-Russian language films that scored a nomination was Ukraine's Wartime Romance (1984) about a soldier and a nurse during World War II and its aftermath.
Ukraine's most lauded submission as its own country was arguably either the documentary Donbass (2018) by the great Sergei Loznitsa or the intrigue thriller A Driver For Vera (2004) which scored a few awards in their time. Vera was disqualifed due to the Academy's highly subjective rule stating that that the submitting country "must certify that creative talent of that country exercised artistic control of the film." That rule has tripped up numerous international co-productions over the years.
Bosnia and Herzegovina's Oscar Stats
Submitting since 1994
20 Total Submissions
1 Nomination / 1 Win (No Man's Land, 2001)
1 Non-Nominated Finalist (An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, 2013)
Statistical Caveat: Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the former Yugoslavia which also included Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia... all of which submit individually since the breakup. Yugoslavia was popular with the Oscars earning 6 nominations between 1958 and 1985.
Reader Comments (1)
Atlantis! I wrote about this one not too long ago and predicted it would be Ukraine's submission. http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2020/9/4/what-will-we-miss-with-a-streaming-future.html