Alice Diop’s Saint Omer and Mia Hansen-Love’s One Fine Morning are among five films on the shortlist for France’s submission to the 2023 best international feature Oscar.
The shortlist, which was chosen today by a new-look French Oscar commission, also includes Eric Gravel’s Full Time, Lise Akoka and Romane Gueret’s The Worst Ones, and Alice Winocour’s terrorist attack drama Paris Memories.
The committee will meet the producers, sales representatives and – where applicable - US distributor of each film on September 23, to make the final choice of which title will represent France at next year’s Oscars.
Diop’s fiction feature debut Saint Omer premiered at Venice Film Festival earlier this month, winning two awards in Saturday’s ceremony – the Silver Lion Grand Jury prize, and the Luigi De Laurentis Lion of the Future award for best debut film. Wild Bunch International is selling the courtroom drama, about a novelist who attends a trial intending to write a modern-day adaptation of the myth of Medea.
Hansen-Love’s eighth feature One Fine Morning launched in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, and is sold by Les Films du Losange. Starring Lea Seydoux, it follows a young woman struggling to secure a decent nursing home for her father; who begins an affair with a friend who is in a relationship.
Starring Virginie Efira, Winocour’s Paris Memories is inspired by the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. Pathe International is selling the film.
Akoka and Gueret’s The Worst Ones won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes this May. Sold by Pyramide International, it follows a group of teenagers from the same neighborhood who are selected to act in a feature film during the summer.
Gravel’s Full Time is a Venice Horizons 2021 premiere, about a woman who finally gets an interview for a job that might help her raise her children better, only for a national transport strike to occur. Be For Films is selling the title.
France Oscar changes
France made changes to its Oscar committee this summer, having experienced a 30-year gap since its last award in the international feature category (for Regis Wargnier’s Indochine in 1993) – its longest-ever drought.
The new seven-person committee consists of two sales agents, two filmmakers, two producers and one industry figure, all appointed by minister of culture Rima Abdul-Malak.
CNC president Dominique Boutonnat and Unifrance head Serge Toubiana participate in the committee as observers, but without voting rights.
Toubiana was one of three leading figures to lose a voting seat in the recent changes, alongside Cannes Film Festival president Thierry Fremaux and Veronique Cayla, president of the Cesar Academy.
Submissions to the international feature Oscar must be made to the Academy by October 3.
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