15 Top Contenders for the Best International Feature Film Oscar Shortlist IndieWire 1/25/2021
Over the last five years, the Academy has made it increasingly easier for more voters to participate in the phase-one Best International Feature Film Oscar nominating committee, never more than during this pandemic year, when online viewing made it possible for all members to watch the movies, as long as they notched the minimum number of 12 assigned features.
With Oscar deadlines pushed back by two months, the Academy rules required that countries submit motion pictures that were released theatrically between October 1, 2019 and December 31, 2020. This year’s expanded shortlist of 15 (just like the documentary branch) will be revealed on February 9, 2021, with no executive committee saves, due to the pandemic.
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There’s a moment in Béla Tarr’s 1988 film, “Damnation,” one of many excellent retrospective titles to emerge on virtual screens this year, that I’m tempted to describe as “very 2020.”
We are in a mud-soaked Hungarian coal-mining town, awash in gloomy spirits and gloomier weather. Amid a torrential downpour, a broken man clambers up a slope and finds himself face to face with a large, growling dog. Rather than back away, the man drops down on all fours and growls right back, seething and snarling and eventually scaring the poor creature off. The dog is defeated; so is the man, a loser in life and in love. But as is often the case in Tarr’s cinema, although the character’s motives may be specific, his condition is curiously, even banally universal. It’s as though we are all feral animals under the skin, destined to slog our way through a rain-pelted hellscape before tearing one another and ourselves apart.