Latest in Oscar Best International Feature Film Category

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car scooped the International Feature Film Oscar on Sunday, becoming the second movie from Japan to take a competitive prize in the category formerly known as Best Foreign Language Film (it’s the fifth for Japan if we count honorary awards given out in the 1950s). From the Dolby stage, and…

After whittling down from 93 country submissions to a shortlist of 15, the Oscars' Best International Feature category has its final five nominees, welcoming some familiar faces, and for the first time, an entirely new entrant. Lunana: A Yak In The Classroom by filmmaker Pawo Choyning Dorji, is only the second movie…

Panama makes its debut on the International Feature Oscar shortlist with the character-driven thriller Plaza Catedral. This contender from Abner Benaim (Ruben Blades Is Not My Name) is a taut two-hander between a grieving mother and a young street hustler, with a sobering message about corruption and violence. Samuel G…

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today unveiled its shortlist of 15 films that will advance to the next stage of voting in the International Feature Film category at the Oscars. Notable among omissions is Julia Ducournau's Titane, the entry from France which won the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or…

The 15-strong shortlist for the Oscars’ International Feature Film category is due on Tuesday, so it's time to run down my annual preview of titles that have a good shot at making the cut. Films from a total 93 countries are eligible in the race this year, and below we take a close look at a selection of them. As…

French-born filmmaker Elie Grappe moved to Switzerland 10 years ago and is now representing his adopted home in the International Feature Oscar race with Olga, a movie that itself focuses on a character living between two worlds. Olga debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the SACD prize in the Critics'…

The eponymous edifice of Cambodia's International Feature Oscar entry, White Building, is barely white at all by the time we encounter it. A low-rise apartment block in Phnom Penh — the sort of teeming anthill of humanity familiar to anyone who has spent time in a South East Asian city — it is stained with tropical…

Director/writer Igor Drljaca's The White Fortress premiered at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and is Bosnia and Herzegovina's official submission to the International Feature Oscar race. In the film, two teens from very different backgrounds meet in post-war Sarajevo. Faruk (Pavle Cemerikic) lives with…

Flash, flicker, flash, cut to black. We're watching grainy film of men walking in and out of the stalls in a West German public toilet, casting glances at each other, maybe a fumbling feel; a reverse angle shows us the camera behind the mirror. The men can't see it, but some of them must surely guess it's there and…

There are moments in Drunken Birds, Serbian Canadian director Ivan Grbovic's long-awaited second feature, that evoke strong sense memories of Days Of Heaven, Terrence Malick's definitive film about the beauty and hardship of the rural laboring life. Days Of Heaven was set in 1916; Drunken Birds takes place today on a…

Debuting at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, Leave No Traces instantly became Poland’s official submission for the International Feature Oscar race. Directed by Jan P. Matuszyński, it's based on a reportage by Cezary Lazarewicz and chronicles true events that took place in 1983, when Poland was shaken by…

In 1999, 240 people disappeared when Serbian forces descended on the village of Krusha e Madhe in Kosovo, shot or captured the men and burned the residents out. According to the end-titles in Blerta Basholli's triple Sundance-award winning Hive, there are still 64 missing. Hive, the International Feature Oscar…