The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have released the short list of films being eligible to be nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.
But the big surprise isn’t which films made the list, but which ones did not. Critic and audience favorites Persepolis, Exiled, The Orphanage and Four Months, Three Weeks And Two Days all failed to make the cut. All four films received decent distribution with Persepolis and Four Months earning both numerous film festival awards as well as places on several critics year end “Best of” lists.
The selected films were chosen from 63 qualifying films that were submitted to the Academy last year. Of the nine, five will be selected as the nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.
The shortlisted films, listed in alphabetical order by country, are:
- The Counterfeiters, Stefan Ruzowitzky, director, Austria
- The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Cao Hamburger, director, Brazil
- Days of Darkness, Denys Arcand, director, Canada
- Beaufort, Joseph Cedar, director, Israel
- The Unknown Woman, Giuseppe Tornatore, director, Italy
- Mongol, Sergei Bodrov, director, Kazakhstan
- Katyn, Andrzej Wajda, director, Poland
- 12, Nikita Mikhalkov, director, Russia
- The Trap, Srdan Golubovic, director, Serbia
