Pan Nalin On India’s Oscar Entry ‘Last Film Show’: “I Was 9 When I Saw My First Film, And I Was Just Blown Away” – Contenders International

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today revealed the 15-film shortlist of movies that will advance to the nominations process for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. As we have previously reported, this is a year without a hands-down front-runner, and all of the movies in our preview have made the cut. See the full shortlist below.

Colombian cinema has shown a ferocious loyalty to the country’s dispossessed: to the generation that lost its lands to exploitation and its moral moorings to the drug trade, to the kids who grew up parentless on the streets or found some kind of refuge in the militias that terrorized the country. It has also proved to be a hotbed of vibrant artistic experiment. Films such as Monos (2019) and La Jauria (2022), in which myth, magic and documentary observation collide and mingle, are notable for their untethered energy and complete disregard for prescribed categories. Stories are not so much told as imaginatively experienced. Perhaps, in a country with so few visible rules, anything is possible. 

From Bergen to Malta, Liverpool, New York and Halifax: Norwegian merchant seamen Alfred (Kristoffer Joner) and Sigbjorn (Pal Sverre Hagen) sometimes seem to be competing for screen time with datelines in Gunnar Vikene’s epic War Sailor, Norway’s Oscar submission. Sprawling, packed with anecdote and surging from one dramatic peak to the next, War Sailor sets out to tell the stories of the ordinary but unsung heroes who helped defeat Germany in 1945. It has the best of intentions.

Cáit runs back home, we see a crying baby, and her mother upbraids her for coming into the house with mud on her shoes.Bairéad and director of photography Kate McCullough (Hulu’s “Normal People”) emphasize Cáit’s alienation from her surroundings in their compositions, but they also strive to give the images a very soft look, with ghostly light on Cáit’s serious face. Cáit is always looking down and then looking up apprehensively, as if she expects some calamity at any moment, which is justified when boys knock some milk into her lap at school; other kids call her “a weirdo” because she keeps so much to herself.The effects with light that McCullough gets in these early scenes can be entrancing, as when she catches the way that a white neon light above a bar molds the head of Cáit’s father in profile, or the pink light from a television set as it is reflected on a wall.

A trio of teens navigates relationships in contemporary Helsinki in Girl Picture, Finland’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar. Directed by Alli Haapasalo (Love and Fury), it’s an engaging portrait of young women that’s as refreshing as it is entertaining. To call this a “Finnish Booksmart” would be doing its originality a disservice, but there are coincidental similarities as a quick-witted lesbian and her straight girl friend try to help each other with their love lives over a series of parties and amusing encounters. 

Love and compassion don’t require grand gestures. Often, the subtlest actions forge the deepest, most meaningful connections — a patient ear, a shared space, a gentle hand.

Why do we have children? Cait’s Mam and Da would be hard-pressed to answer that, with a house full of sour teenage daughters, a toddler barely walking, another baby about to land and not enough money to pay a day laborer to bring in the hay. These are the kind of kids who go to school with no lunch. 

It’s 2002 and raining brains in Riyadh, at least from the gormless Nasser’s wonky perspective. Nasser’s doctor is firmly convinced he has a brain tumour, which is his explanation for the protracted hallucinations Nasser experiences and that he, Dr Ahmed, is all too ready to excise. Nasser isn’t so sure: his dreams, fantasies and visions are more fun than the rest of his life, yoked beneath the twin tyrannies of his fanatical father and his boss at the thinly patronized Dove Hotel. Why get rid of the good stuff? Especially once those visions start to include the mysterious young woman who arrived unannounced one day to ask for the key to room 227. She’s welcome to walk the corridors of his mind any old time.

An Afro-European woman connects with her roots in Bantú Mama, the Dominican Republic’s entry for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Co-written and directed by Ivan Herrera, it’s was picked up by Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing. It’s a compelling drama featuring a strong performance from Clarisse Albrecht, who also co-wrote the screenplay.

Looks like a good old fashion cash grab celebrity endorsement has become a bit more fraught when it comes to the digital marketplace nowadays.

The Cherokee Nation Film Office has announced Echota Killsnight as its first television apprentice. 

Norma Rae, Places in the Heart, Mrs. Doubtfire, Forrest Gump, and Lincoln. But ask her how it feels to be an icon, and the 76-year-old gives a look and an answer that clearly thinks otherwise. “I find it kind of shocking," she says over Zoom.

Jordanian director Darin J. Sallam and producers Deema Azar and Ayeh Jadaneh have accused Israel of mounting a disinformation campaign against their film Farha and also rebuked the country for attempting to get it removed from theatres and Netflix.

Over the course of 144 minutes, Philip Yung’s true-crime drama Where the Wind Blows covers an awful lot of ground. An epic in the style Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time in New York, it pairs Asian superstars Tony Leung and Aaron Kwok in a story spanning several decades of police corruption in Hong Kong during its time as a British colony. The detail is sometimes dense, but the tone turns playful and refreshingly light at times, and there’s even a memorable musical routine for “The God of Dance” Kwok.

A critical hit at this year’s Berlinale, Michael Koch’s second feature A Piece of Sky is a sober relationship drama with a difference: It takes place in a picturesque Alpine idyll, with its sections interspersed by a folk choir that acts as an unorthodox Greek chorus. Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders International award-season event Saturday, Koch explained: “It’s a story about a couple in a remote mountain village who meet and then are put to the test due to a brain cancer that the man has. The film is about how she deals with it, how the couple deal with it, and how strong love can be.”

It’s rare that a sequel competes in the International Oscar category, especially when the first part didn’t get selected. It’s a measure of Erik Matti’s latest film that, though it follows on from 2013’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title On the Job—or rather, starts in the aftermath—this second instalment stands alone. “The big difference between the two,” said Matti, “is that the first one was set in urban Manila, and the second one is set in the countryside of the Philippines, just to show two contrasts that exist within both worlds.”

Crackdowns in China seem to be in the news a lot lately, making Jason Loftus’s film Eternal Spring all the more timely. The protagonist of this hybrid documentary is a brilliant Chinese artist named Daxiong, who was forced into exile because of his affiliation with a movement known as Falun Gong, a controversial New Age self-help group that became increasingly threatening to the authorities as it grew in size. In 1999, president Jiang Zemin finally outlawed the organization, leading to imprisonments and death.

When director Darin J. Sallam came to make her feature debut with Farah, she always knew what the subject matter would be: as a little girl, Sallam’s mother used to tell her the story of a teenage girl who was locked up in her room during the partition of Palestine in 1948. “She was locked up by her father to protect her life,” Sallam recalls. “She survived [the conflict] and she made it to Syria, where she met a Syrian girl and shared her story with her. This Syrian girl grew up, got married and had a child, and she shared the story with her daughter—and this daughter happened to be me.”