The American Film Academy has excluded the Portuguese film
Listen, directed by Ana Rocha de Sousa, from the nomination for Best Foreign Film at the 2021 Oscars.
After analyzing the Portuguese submission, the American Film Academy informed that “The International Feature Film Executive Committee decided the candidacy was ineligible and requested that a new film candidacy be submitted as urgently as possible,” the Portuguese Academy of Cinema (APC) announced.
The American Film Academy has concluded that the film is mostly spoken in the English language, and, therefore, does not comply with the competition rules.
According to the APC source, “the exclusion is linked to one of the eligibility criteria that requires at least 50 percent of the participant film must be spoken in a non-English language.”