Latest in Oscar Best Foreign Language Film

EXCLUSIVE: Here’s the U.S. trailer for A White, White Day, the Icelandic Oscar submission that Film Movement is releasing domestically in February. Directed by Hlynur Palmason, the pic is set in a remote Icelandic town, following an off-duty police chief who begins to suspect a local man of having had an affair with…

Poland has chosen Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cannes-winning black and white drama Cold War as its Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film. The well-reviewed story of a fated Polish love affair set across Europe during the late 1950s and early 1960s, is among the favorites for the prize. It is Pawlikowski’s first film…

Chilean director Pablo Larrain has been to the Oscar party before; his 2012 political satire No was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category. Last year, The Club was nominated for a Golden Globe after winning the Grand Jury Prize in Berlin. Now, he's got the distinction of having two films in the Oscar…

An Indian writer/director previously known for romantic drama Aadukalam and 2007’s Ruthless Man, Vetri Maaran brought his latest film, Interrogation, to this year’s Venice Film Festival, where it was met with a warm response and was honored with the Amnesty International Italia Award and the Venice Horizons Award. Now…

Selected as Norway’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, Erik Poppe’s docudrama The King’s Choice made headlines last month when Norway’s Crown Prince and Crown Princess arrived in Toronto for a glitzy screening of the celebrated film. Breaking Norwegian box office records and making an impression stateside, Th…

A Palme D’Or nominee at the Cannes Film Festival, writer/director Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada has been submitted as Romania’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film. A sprawling, ambitious family drama, coming in at a nearly three hour running time, the latest entry from the much-lauded filmmaker tells the story of…

Making an an accomplished debut at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize in the world cinema category, Elite Zexer’s Sand Storm was named Best Film at the Ophir Awards—Israel’s version of the Academy Awards—while picking up a number of other accolades on the festival circuit. Subsequently…

Director Juris Kursietis knew he had to make his Latvian Oscar entry film Modris when he kept seeing the same stories in the news over and over again. "Every other month, I was reading this story of a kid put into jail because he had stolen some candy from the Petrol station," says Kursietis, a fact which he chalks up…

Aferim!, Romania's foreign film Oscar entry, is enjoyably challenging and hard to pin down.  Described by some critics as Shakespearean in style with a hard R-rating, the film actually evokes Sergio Leone  spaghetti westerns, however, this one is set in Eastern Europe circa 1835—a period that’s not often portrayed on…

There are 81 films vying for the Foreign Language Oscar this year, two fewer than last year's record 83 but no less rich with subjects and auteurs from around the world. Each year the Foreign Language Film Award Committee faces an increasing embarrassment of riches, which it has to whittle down to just nine films for…

Stranger marks director Yermak Tursonov’s third film from his native country Kazakhstan to be submitted to the Oscars, his 2009 title Kelin was the last shortlisted. Set in the 1930s Kazakhstan, the film about a villager, Iliyas, who defies Soviet society and escapes for a life in the wilderness, hits a number of…

Childhood innocence crashing with a world of great violence is an ongoing motif this season among some of the Oscar foreign film language whether its the teenager who discovers his former military father’s great sin in Bulgaria’s The Judgment  to Hungary's entry, Son of Saul, which follows a father yearning to give…