Japan and Latvia and make their Oscar submissions

Two more official Oscar submissions to report bringing us to a dozen competitors. Only about 80 films to go!  It's starting to feel exciting, isn't it? At least it is for us here at TFE since we love the diversity and eye-opening capabilities of this category. The latest countries to choose their films are Japan and Latvia.

🇯🇵 PLAN 75
Japan (14 nominations, 2 wins, 3 honorary awards, and 1 additional finalist from 69 submissions)

Plan 75 is the feature directorial debut of 46 year old female director Chie Hayakawa. This is a theoretical drama about the near future when a government program encourages senior citizens to be euthanized to combat an aging population. The film played in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in May and hit Japanese theaters in June. 

(Japan, hot off their fifth Oscar for Drive My Car, is the the only Asian country that Oscar voters have regularly cared about / paid attention to despite the audience popularity of India's Bollywood as well as long hard-to-miss critical stretches of acclaim/cinephile obsession for various other countries, particularly China / Taiwan / Hong Kong from 80s through the 90s, Thailand in the 00s, and South Korea from the 00s through the current moment. Sure they notice a film here or there, but that's not the same as general curiousity and interest.) 

🇱🇻 JANUARY
Latvia (no results yet from 14 submissions)

This is a coming-of-age feature about a young filmmaker trying to find himself as Latvia struggles to gain independence. The director Viesturs Kairiss was around 18-19 years old during that struggle so we're assuming this is at least autobiographically inspired if not actually autobiographical. With this submission Kairiss becomes the first director to be submitted twice by his home country. His films have been well received at home with Chronicles of Melanie being arguably his most well known feature (and the previous Oscar submission in 2017). 

Updated Oscar Charts 
Pg 1 - Albania through Greece
Pg 2 - Haiti through Norway
Pg 3 - Palestine through Vietnam
Current Predictions

Comments

[Edwin]

It really is shocking that only 3 Indian films have ever been nominated and that none have won. Maybe there have been times when it’s been because India submitted the wrong film (I feel like The Lunchbox would probably have been nominated in 2013 had it been chosen as the submission), but how the Academy of 1959 justified not nominating The World of Apu when that WAS India’s submission is just beyond me. It’ll be interesting to see what happens if they submit RRR this year, because while it’s not the type of film this committee usually goes for and I therefore worry it has “surprise snub” written all over it, its high profile and global popularity might overcome their typical prejudice against genre fare.

[Kris]

I've seen "January"... we can forget about Latvia being nominated this year... it was not even nearly good enough for the half finals... I guess it's more personal for the makers and for the latvians themselves and maybe wanting to educate the world about what has happened there... The film was gloomy, boring and lacked the punch... nearly fell asleep watching it. Maybe it was a poor film year for latvians after the pandemic for not finding something better to represent...