Karina at Spoutblog has been busy keeping on eye on a movie for our consideration and did some checking to make sure it doesn’t get the old heave ho come Oscar time:
Frequent readers of SpoutBlog know that I am head-over-heels in love Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, a drama set in a Mexican Mennonite community and shot entirely in the almost-lost German dialect, Plautdeitsch. So of course, I was overjoyed to get a press release last night saying that the film had been deemed eligible as Mexico’s submission for the Foreign Language Oscar.
But then I remembered a scandal a couple of years back, involving an Italian film called Private. At the time, the Academy deemed Private ineligible for the Foreign Language category, because the film was shot in a language (Arabic) other than the primary language of its submitting country, and even after Italy protested, AMPAS said they had no intention of changing the rule. “At this point, we don’t foresee any discussions about this issue,” an Academy spokeswoman told Anthony Kaufmann for indieWIRE. “We like to see the countries represented in the films.”
Funnily enough, according to a press release I dug up on Oscars.org, the Academy went on to change that rule the very next year.
So thank god for that.
Meanwhile, Mr. Schnack is hopping mad at David Ansen’s declaring the documentary film market washed up:
Bottom line – We’re likely to end the year with 4-7 nonfictions grossing more than $4 million. The record? 4 films did it in 2005. It’s hard to argue that equaling or surpassing that success denotes a industry-wide downturn for docs, yet it’s apparent that even our favorite film writers might not yet have received the memo.
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so…is there a connection bewteen this being a presidential election year in the states and getting 4,000 docs in 2007/2008 ?????
Water managed to garner a nomination for Canada, and it was in Hindi, so I think it`s possible for this film to get nominated too. By the way, why does the title say “more doc news” when it`s about a foreign film?
oh wait, my bad, I didn`t read all the way to the bottom.
I do not get the connection between silent Light and documentaries since it is a work of fiction. But I agree with Karen, Silent Light is the most beautiful movie ever made and one that might never be released in the US in spite of its multiple awards. Just in the last month this movie won awards at Sidney and Munich.
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