Monday, September 04, 2006

The Foreign Film Oscar Race Begins...

Last week we covered The Netherlands submission for the Oscar Foreign Film Race. Today we move rapidly in the southeastern direction for news from Australia: the submission of Ten Canoes. Rolf de Heer's film tells a mythical story about a covetous young man in tribal times. It's the first all indigenous language film to come from Australian. [src]

Landmark status like that can be helpful in the foreign film race. Why? Any publicity hook is good when you're competing with 50 other films for attention. You want the committee to be predisposed to thinking about you, curious about you, rooting for you before they embark on their exhaustive screening schedule.

Submissions have also been announced for The Netherlands and Bosnia.

UPDATE: The Foreign Language Oscar Pages @ The Film Experience are now up! They're ready to be filled with gallons of info culled from various news sources and reader contributions.

Thank you to readers A.D., Aldo, Ali, Lyn, Mikkel, Nedim, Ralph, and Yonatan

Tags: foreign films, , , Oscars, Academy Awards, cinema, Film...

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope it makes it, Australian films are usually at a disadvantage at the oscars as they can't be classified as foreign films. It would be good to see ten canoes get a nod.

Anonymous said...

I saw Ten Canoes while on vacation in Sydney last month, and liked it very much. Beautiful photography, and a lovely bit of dry, witty narration (in English) from David Gulpilil.

Anonymous said...

The other thing about Ten Canoes is that it's not often you see a film set 10,000 years ago!

Glenn Dunks said...

YESYESYESYESYESYESYESYES!!!

This is such great news. I heard about this over the weekend from somebody at a film screening I was at, but hadn't read it confirmed. I wasn't sure if it would be considered because there is quite a bit of english in there. I predicted Ten Canoes would get a nomination in my May predix. The only problem is that it may be percieved as too "light" compared to movies about WW2 and such.

But, YES!!! I loved this movie so much. Incredibly well-made, it looks fantastic and it really is a landmark film. It's not very often that you can say a film is the first ever in a certain language (Yesterday from South Africa was I believe).

God, I would love Rolf de Heer to have an Oscar statue. That'd be unreal!

BTW, it's also not very often you find a film set 10,000 years ago that also has FLASHBACKS! And that's in black and white and colour.

(sorry, but I'm really pumped about this. THis is only Australia's second submission to the Foreign category too. The first was La Spagnola in 2001)

Javier Aldabalde said...

I adore your foreign film section. Maybe a little redundant, since I'm from a "foreign" country myself, but still...

NATHANIEL R said...

javier thanks
they are lots of work and i sometimes wonder if anyone is looking at them...

Anonymous said...

Hey kamikaze,
Floating Life was also submitted in 1996. The director was Clara Law and the film was mostly in Cantonese, if I recall correctly.

Anonymous said...

Check it ou homes cinder block and exterior siding if your building homes go to Http://siding11.com/side.pl?y=helper