FYC. 1.

It's been widely reported, at least here at GreenCine, that the number of countries submitting films this year for consideration in the Oscars category of Best Foreign Language Film set a record: 91. Yet, in a sad twist, as Anthony Kaufmann noted in the New York Times, so far only seven of these films have US distributors - and chances are, few more will be acquired. This news saddens me, since I prefer my films subtitled. The difficulties the US is having in the world presently are due in part to its insularity and the shrinking profile of world cinema in this country only further weakens us where we are weakest. Yet, I am well aware that I live in a part of the US that will bring packed houses to a six-hour epic such as The Best of Youth at the Balboa Theater. So my sadness is more for the rest of my youth throughout the US outside of the film havens that bookend the country - San Francisco and New York.

My appreciation of world cinema is what brought me to rent a car last weekend to attend a sliver of the For Your Consideration series at the wonderful Christopher B Smith Rafael Film Center. For the third year running, the Rafael has brought a considerable selection of the foreign-language films submitted for the Academy's consideration (this year's series is programmed by Assistant Programmer Jennifer Schmidt). The series began with South Africa's entry, Tstotsi (Gavin Hood) and ends with Romania's entry, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu). The trailer for the former is running in select theatres as I type and the latter will see its US release in April in New York, representing two of the afore-mentioned seven. In between those two, the Rafael has brought the submissions from Croatia, Chile, Fiji, Costa Rica, Hungary, Slovak Republic, Columbia, Finland, Spain, Thailand, Iceland, Indonesia, Mexico, Slovenia, Bolivia, Israel and Estonia. I caught films from the latter six.

Before I go any further, it's important to emphasize that the category calls for the "Foreign Language" films. This is the sad fact that Singapore and Eric Khoo learned this year when his film Be With Me was disqualified because Singaporeans have the audacity to make their official language English. Even though the English spoken there has its own pronunciations and Talking Cock flavor, it's too similar and has too much of what the Academy understands to be English to qualify. As much as I think this is an annoying technicality, and a shameful one considering it adversely affects Khoo and a film I've heard good things about, it does help the Academy whittle down the selection of nominees, a selection that is further whittled by the fact that each country is only permitted to submit one entry. Of the 91 submissions, 58 were "eligible," which is still a record.

Bolivia found herself disqualified by yet another technicality. Apparently two 35mm prints must arrive at the Academy by a certain date, and Bolivia's entry, Say Good Morning to Dad (Fernando Vargas), didn't make that date. The film traces a narrative backwards over three decades in the town near where Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara was killed, Vallegrande. Each set of characters in this film has their own use for Che's image. The local mayor wants to keep the town a tourist attraction, the military wants to hide what happened and the elder women want Che to remain a guardian to watch over them. The film stimulates discussion of what has happened to Che's image as it's been super icon-isized to sell throughout the world. But the film limits its impact by trying to achieve too much impact. What I mean by that is that the film has an overzealous score that attempts to amplify the emotions of the scenes to the point of overriding those scenes. Like Spielberg's need to have his characters spell out what was conveyed visually just moments before in Munich, Vargas has the music overdo what should blossom from the acting. I will submit that I write here ignorant of Latin American film history, and perhaps there is a tradition of musical theater-type scores, perhaps an influence of melodramatic telenovelas, but it results in the film failing to resonate with me, whatever the score.

Interestingly, the other Latin American entry I caught also made a reference to Che. The home of a Cuban family has Che's image mounted on the wall. Thankfully, unlike the World Baseball Classic, Cuba's films are allowed to enter the US. (And more reasons to be thankful: the US rescinded its stupid decision to keep Cuba out of the Classic this time around.) It wasn't Cuba's entry, Viva Cuba (Juan Carlos Cremata Malberti) that I saw, however. It was Mexico's On the Other Side (Gustavo Loza). This film follows three separate children, a boy from Mexico, a boy from Cuba and a girl from Morocco. What connects these children is the disconnect from their fathers. Each has a father who is forced to travel beyond borders in order to find work to provide for their families.

Another criterion is that the language of the film submitted must be primarily in the submitting country's official language. Austria discovered this when submitting the French-language Caché (Michael Haneke) as did Italy when its first submission, Private (Saverio Costanzo) was disqualified, a film that features Hebrew, Arabic and English since it takes place in the Middle East. Unlike Austria, Italy apparently had enough time, or saw enough importance to bother, to submit a second film that met eligibility requirements - Cristina Comencini's The Beast in the Heart. In Mexico's case, it's a good thing the Academy doesn't know much about the differences between Mexican, Cuban, and Castilian Spanish to disqualify their entry since barely a third of the film is spoken in the Mexican variant.

I initially thought On the Other Side was intended for younger audiences, but when the Mexican boy starts liberally peppering his dialogue with the F-word and a lecherous man gets too friendly with the Moroccan girl who has left her village to jump a ship to Spain to retrieve her father, I realized it won't be screening any time soon on Baby Brigade night at the Parkway in Oakland. Each of these children makes a private adult decision to go visit his or her father "On the Other Side" of vast waters. Particularly poignant is the Cuban story with its a breathtaking image of the Cuban boy and his childhood friend racing to the ocean to paddle to the US. Loza chose a shot of a huge sky with the children appearing as an insignificant, yet significant, zero and minus sign rushing towards the pier from the lower left-hand side of the screen. I wish Loza had held this image longer, but even with its brief appearance, it is the image that most stayed with me out of all the films I crammed into my weekend.

From children left behind to men and women doing the leaving in the Israeli film What a Wonderful Place (Eyal Halfon). This film presents glimpses into the lives of the adult migrant workers who have had to leave their families and homelands to survive financially. While considerable time is spent on the story of a Ukrainian woman snuck into Israel as human cargo for prostitution and a Filipino and Filipina nurse who are having difficulty getting pregnant, other migrant workers from other countries such as Thailand are given camera time as well. On the Israeli side, we have a farm owner who brought the Thais over legally, a rancher who becomes frustrated with the Thais constant planting of illegal traps, and an ex-cop whose gambling debt has tied him a noose connected to the hands of the men he used to bust as he works as a money runner and overseer of the prostitutes for a subset of the Israeli mafia. The film criss-crosses between stories throughout, establishing some nice cross empathies. The rancher's disabled father is taken care of by the Filipino nurse who himself has a gambling problem. The rancher, although frustrated with the Thais, is presented as quite understanding of his nurse's plight. The ex-cop protects one Ukrainian prostitute in particular but not in as paternalistic a way as such a relationship is often portrayed. Sans sexual transaction, she saves him from drowning in his sorrow as much as he saves her.

Of the films I saw, What a Wonderful Place seems have the qualities that will appeal most to the middle-brow tastes of the Academy. (It won four Israeli Academy Awards.) Following the intertwining plots that are so popular these days, where different walks of life Crash into each other with a script-assigned randomness, the film also brings up issues currently topical in the US. I wouldn't be surprised if this film were selected as a nominee. Personally, however, I was more affected by the Indonesian and Slovenian entries, which I'll get to in my next report from the series.

Posted by dwhudson at January 28, 2006 2:26 AM