On the Foreign Language Oscar nominees.

As I was on the Fipresci jury at the Palm Springs International Festival, I must be one of the few people on earth who has seen almost all of the 63 submissions for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. I say this not to boast but to elicit pity. However, it makes me more qualified than most to judge the final round of Oscar nominees.

Because of its proximity to Los Angeles, the self-styled "movie capital of the world," it is a particularity of the Palm Springs Festival, now in its 19th year, to screen as many of the Foreign Language submissions as possible just prior to the announcement of the short list. Our jury of three had the unenviable task, with the help of DVDs sent to us a few weeks before the festival, to find a winner from the 53 submissions from countries ranging from Argentina to Vietnam. Unfortunately, only 10 percent were of a level worth considering.

Most of the films were either too bad or too good to have any chance of winning an Oscar. One wonders what criteria were used by the committees of the countries in choosing their candidates. Some obviously had in mind what they believed to be the kind of film that the Academy goes for. Obviously this was the reasoning behind Indonesia's choice of Denias, Singing on the Cloud, a simplistic propagandist piece for the government, over the extraordinary Opera Jawa. It was sad also to watch the Philippines representative, Donsol, a crudely made film about white whale sharks, when they had an excellent gang film called Tribe at their disposal.

Presumably, Peru could come up with nothing better than Crossing a Shadow, a leaden biopic, with faint echoes of Fitzcarraldo, about a pioneering engineer (played by an actor who would have won a prize for the best moustache). Other disappointments were the submissions from India (a spectacular but conventional Bollywood melodrama entitled Eklavya: The Royal Guard), Norway (the unfunny misogynistic Gone With the Woman), Thailand (a 165-minute gory swordwielding saga, King of Fire - presumably they considered Syndromes and a Century too advanced for the Academy), Switzerland (a feel-good geriatric comedy called Late Bloomers), Iran (M for Mother, a sentimental soap opera lacking anything that one has come to admire in that country's cinema) and Colombia (Satanas, a distasteful episodic drama featuring a serial killer).

The countries which came up with excellent films (maybe not their best) were Denmark (The Art of Crying, about a remorseful abusive father), Japan (I Just Didn't Do It, a gripping "Wrong Man" condemnation of the Japanese legal system and beyond), Bosnia (It's Hard To Be Nice, a delightfully sardonic view of the country, ably illustrating the title) and Turkey (Takva, A Man's Fear of God, a brave exposure of religious - Muslim - corruption). Hats off to Sweden for submitting Roy Andersson's quirky black comedy You, The Living, knowing (or not) that it would be too singular for the conservative Academy.

Although 4 Months, Three Weeks, Two Days (Romania), Persepolis (France), Belle Toujours (Portugal, because of the director, Manoel d'Oliveira) and Secret Sunshine (Korea) were among the cream of the crop in competition (Silent Light was not shown in Palm Springs), we decided that it would be somewhat pointless to add to the myriad plaudits they have received. (However, we presented acting awards to the two fine female leads in 4 Months, and to the hitherto overlooked Song Gang-Ho in Secret Sunshine.) We, therefore, presented the Fipresci prize to Armin, a Croatian movie directed by Ognjen Svilici, "because of its sensitive portrayal of a father and son relationship and the subtle intimations of unseen horrors, brilliantly evoked in a serio-comic manner."

Not surprisingly, the Academy has gone for content over style, the academic (they are the Academy Awards after all) over the innovative, the respectable over the adventurous - obtusely ignoring the far better films mentioned in the previous paragraph - the nominees being The Counterfeiters (Austria), Beaufort (Israel), Mongol (Kazakhstan), Katyn (Poland) and 12 (Russia).

-Ronald Bergan

"Roy Andersson and his tragicomedy about humankind, You, the Living, was the darling of [Monday] night's annual ceremony in Stockholm for the Guldbagge Awards, taking home the most prestigious statuettes for Best Film, Best Director and Best Script," reports Annika Pham for Cineuropa.

Over at the Evening Class, Michael Hawley looks back on the best European films he caught at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.

Earlier: James Van Maanen on Armin and his discussion with three of the Croatian directors represented in last fall's series, Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema.

Posted by dwhudson at January 23, 2008 12:30 PM