A clearer picture is emerging on how the Academy’s rule changes will affect the Oscars’ international feature category.
New eligibility criteria for the Oscars’ best international feature category were announced in May. For the first time, international non-English-language films that win top awards in six leading festivals (Berlin, Busan, Cannes, Sundance, Venice and Toronto) can be submitted alongside films chosen through the traditional Academy-approved selection committees.
Ampas has confirmed that documentary and drama films that win Sundance’s World Cinema grand jury prizes are eligible for the award, as long as they are non-English-language and produced outside the US.
This means Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazic’s To Hold A Mountain, the Montenegrin documentary that triumphed at Park City in January, is a potential Oscar candidate. It will also be in the running for the documentary Oscar, having won the main award at Millennium Docs Against Gravity, also a qualifying festival. And it has a strong chance of being the Montenegro entry for the international category.
However, the six or seven festival winners are not automatically entered for the international feature award. They must be submitted and meet the requirements for qualifying theatrical release runs.
There is nothing to prevent national selection committees from choosing a Palme d’Or or Golden Lion winner as their candidate but the rules stipulate that “if a film wins a qualifying festival award and is later selected as the official submission of a country or region, it will be considered an official country/region submission and listed as such”.
A festival winner making the Oscar cut that is not picked to represent its country will be listed under its festival prize.
Tudor Reu of Mobra Film, the Romanian producer of Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning majority Romania-Norway co-production Fjord, confirmed the film is being put forward as a contender to be Romania’s entry.
“It is not guaranteed that Fjord will be the choice,” says Reu. “The Romanian Film Centre has launched the procedure of choosing the national candidate for the Oscar in a foreign language. It is ongoing.”
Thanks to the new festival rule, the filmmakers can submit Fjord themselves if it is not selected by the Romanian committee.
Yellow Letters, winner of this year’s Berlinale Golden Bear, and Shame And Money, which won the Grand Jury Prize Dramatic in Sundance, were not among the 11 films picked for Germany’s selection committee shortlist in the international Oscar category.
They are eligible anyway as festival winners – and Germany could therefore in theory have three films in the international film race.
In this scenario, Simone Baumann, managing director of German Films, the promotional export agency of the territory’s film industry, confirms the organisation will support the Oscar campaigns of all three titles. But not without challenges.
“Our support schemes are all financed by public money,” she says. “We have a yearly budget, and we allocate a certain amount for the Oscar campaign. Suddenly, we have three instead of just one. We won’t have more financial resources to support them, and so we will have to divide the budget into three.”
However, she describes this as “a luxury problem”, and says she is positive about the changes: “It is in favour of the filmmakers.”
Future tweaks
Some have questioned why the number of qualifying festivals has been set at just six. Screen International understands the number may well rise, but Ampas’s international film committee wants to keep the number low for the first year, precisely to see how the change works and gauge feedback.
The response has been positive so far.
“I think it’s great,” says Norway’s Maria Ekerhovd, producer of Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, this year’s international feature Oscar winner. “It is an opportunity for more good films to be nominated and it’s a way of avoiding that situation where the country committees choosing the Oscar candidate are not being transparent or fair.”
Three further festival titles will join the four already known, and they will be confirmed in the next few weeks with the announcements of Venice’s Golden Lion (September 12), TIFF’s Platform winner (September 20) and Busan’s best film prize (October 15).
The prestige of having these award winners deemed Oscar-eligible is not lost on festival directors. When the Academy informed TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey earlier in the year about the rule change, he promptly expanded the Platform selection from 10 to 12 films and increased the jury size from three to five.
“I’ve long thought that the process to get to the international candidates for that Oscar could benefit from being open to more films and a process that allowed countries to have more than just one film in the running,” Bailey told Screen recently. “This will do that.”
Additional reporting by Jeremy Kay.
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