Oscar Volley: Which Foreign Films Will Voters Choose for Best International Feature?

Before we get the shortlist on Thursday, here’s today’s volley, on Best International Feature, from Elisa Giudici and Abe Friedtanzer...

THE ZONE OF INTEREST feels like a lock in this race.

ABE: Hi Elisa! I'm excited to talk about one of my favorite categories, Best International Feature! This year we have 88 submissions from all around the world. While I'm still hoping to catch more in the next few weeks, I think I've managed to track down a good number of the top contenders. Interestingly, this year's likely frontrunner is from a country that rarely gets noticed, in part because most of its films simply aren't eligible. That would be the United Kingdom, which has quite an intense feature in The Zone of Interest, a haunting portrait of the commandant of Auschwitz and his family, who live right next to the infamous concentration camp but live quite the serene life...

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Best International Film: Pakistan's "In Flames" & India's "2018"

by Cláudio Alves

Considering the Academy's general disinclination to honor horror cinema, it's always surprising when the genre pops up amid Best International Film submissions. This year, Pakistan is one of the brave countries that didn't let genre bias stop them from selecting a scary movie for the Oscar race. Zarrar Kahn's In Flames is the lucky flick, a Canadian-produced meditation on grief, trauma, and poisonous patriarchy bound to unnerve viewers. Neighboring nation India didn't dip their toes into nightmare cinema but sent a disaster picture that's horrifying in its own way. Juan Anthany Joseph's 2018 dramatizes a real-life catastrophe that befell the state of Kerala…

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Best International Film: Poland's "The Peasants" & the Philippines' "The Missing"

by Cláudio Alves

As Guillermo del Toro loves to remind us, animation is cinema. It's not a genre but a medium with its own particularities and styles, distinct idioms, and formal grammar. This year, some countries have taken these values to heart, selecting animated works to represent them at the Oscars. Curiously, two of them offer original ways to consider Rotoscoping as an animation practice, defying those who dismiss such films as lesser. They are Poland's The Peasants, from the same team behind Loving Vincent, and The Missing from the Philippines. Between painterly ravishment and digital befuddlement, these filmmakers take Rotoscope cinema to its limits and beyond…

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Best International Film: Italy's "Io Capitano" and Belgium's "Omen"

by Cláudio Alves

Immigrant stories manifest across multiple Oscar submissions this year. There's Sweden's Opponent and Australia's Shayda, with their focus on Iranian expats trying to rebuild in another nation, as well as a vital narrative thread in Germany's Teachers' Lounge. The films from Italy and Belgium turn their gazes to Sub-Saharan Africa, though their perspectives are inverted. Io Capitano considers an odyssey from Senegal to the Italian shore, while Omen starts with a Congolese immigrant looking back to his origins. One is a journey in search of a new life, the other a reflection on an old life left behind. 

Each proposes a cinema hinged on the tension of modern realism and folkloric tradition, dictating wild tonal swerves and keeping in line with many of the most interesting African films in recent memory…

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Interview: 'The Missing' director Carl Joseph Papa and actor Gio Gahol on making Oscar history for the Philippines

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Carlo Aquino and Dolly de Leon.

Carl Joseph Papa's Oscar submission The Missing (original title: Iti Mapukpukaw)  centers on a mouthless young man whose life is rocked when a familiar alien returns to his life. In telling this deeply personal story using animation, Papa examines the long-term effects of childhood trauma on people and how far kindness could go in helping them in reclaiming their voice. The Missing is the Philippines' official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, becoming the country's first animated feature film to represent the country (out of 33 submissions). Out of the eight countries that submitted for the category's first competitive year in 1956, only the Philippines is yet to be nominated.

In this in-depth discussion, writer-director Carl Joseph Papa and actor Gio Gahol tackle the taboo topic of childhood sexual abuse in the country, pulling off the feat of shooting the film within four days, the artists that inspired them in their craft, and working with BAFTA nominee Dolly de Leon (Triangle of Sadness)...

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