Hungary and Romania have each submitted debut films from young directors as their candidates for the best foreign-language category at next year's Academy Awards.

The Romanian candidate is Cristian Mungiu's Occident, produced by Temple Film, which screened in the Director's Fortnight section of this year's Cannes Film Festival. Hungary's entry for the Academy Award is Gyorgy Palfi's Hukkle, a documentary style feature film.

In the past few weeks, the first international submissions to the foreign-language Oscar category have begun to emerge. France has submitted Francois Ozon's 8 Femmes as its entry, while the Dutch chose Zus & Zo, directed by Paula van der Oest.

Romanian candidate Occident deals with the subject of migration and especially focuses on those who stay behind. Occident was released on September 27 on 5 copies and racked up the largest number of admissions in its first two weeks for a Romanian film since 1989. Admissions have already passed the 25,000 mark. The film has traveled widely on international film festival circuit and won the first edition of the Transylvania Film Festival.

Hungarian entry - fiction based documentary style Hukkle - won the New Directors Award at this year's San Sebastian International Film Festival. It features an old man sitting on a bench and hiccuping, a drunken youth snoring on a train, a kindly old lady picking flowers and other idealistic rural life images. All the while, however, a policeman is investigating a murder.

The film features both an amateur and professional cast and is released in Hungary by Mokep on October 24 just making the deadline required by the Academy's rules.