Countdown to the Oscars: Best Foreign Language Film

The Polish film Ida is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Foreign Language Film

The nominees are:

Ida

Leviathan

Tangerines

Timbuktu

Wild Tales

Not that anybody asked me, but I think Federico Fellini is the greatest film director of all time. If you would like to discuss that ranking, I am happy to have that conversation another time, but for now, all that matters is that the greatest director of all time never won a competitive Oscar (if your loyalties lie elsewhere, feel free to insert Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa in place of Fellini). He was nominated in the screenplay categories eight times and four times for best director, but he never won, though he did receive a lifetime achievement award in 1993.

Fellini died later that year after receiving his honorary award, so you may be wondering why I would bring up a director who has been dead more than 20 years. Well, I will tell you. Despite never winning an Oscar in his unparalleled career, Fellini directed four films that were nominated for and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. However, since its inception at the 1956 ceremony, the award has officially gone to the country of origin and not the filmmaker. No longer.

Beginning with this year’s ceremony, the Oscar statuette for Best Foreign Language Film will have the director’s name engraved on it along with the country of origin. The change has been a long time coming. Though the Academy of course will not be retroactively awarding the directors of past winners in this category, future winners will have the privilege of not succumbing to the same Oscar fate as some of the medium’s greats. It is impossible to say if any of this year’s nominees is the next Fellini or Kurosawa, but if they are, the Academy can take pride in having rewarded them here.

Ida (directed by Pawel Pawlikowski) – In spite of a tremendous cinematic heritage that includes greats such as Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, no Polish film has ever won the award for Best Foreign Language Film. Pawlikowski’s small but potent Ida seems set to break that streak. Concerning an orphan raised to be a Catholic nun who finds out her true heritage just days before she is to take her final vows, Ida is a story of faith and forgiveness in a world where both of those qualities are seen as weaknesses.

Gorgeously shot – the film is also nominated for Best Cinematography – and stunningly told, Ida is one of the true gems of the year. Pawlikowski’s film is tiny in scope but big on ideas and has a clear moral center that is never muddied thanks to the straightforward plot and no-frills filmmaking. It is a true testament to the power of a good story well told.

Leviathan (directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev) – I do not know that there is much more I can say about Leviathan, my No. 1 film of the year. It is a dark, brooding masterpiece that is filled to the brim with pitch-black humor, hardline political commentary, and riveting drama. Zvyagintsev speaks for a generation of Russians who came of age under communist rule and who are now watching the country slip back into extremism and antagonism. Zyviagintsev and his cast and crew take all the anger they feel over the current governmental situation and spew it back out as bile onto the screen.

The film follows Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov), who simply by living his life runs afoul of the local mayor. He compounds his problems by attempting to fight back against the crushing behemoth that is the Russian governmental bureaucracy. He winds up in a downward spiral of despair, from which he seeks solace in religion. He finds none. Zyagintsev’s film is an uncompromising descent into the bleakness of a country ruled by a power structure that sees no citizens, just enemies. He provides no easy answers and no happy endings because when you come face to face with the leviathan, your best hope is a quick end.

Timbuktu (directed by Abderrahmane Sissako) – Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) is a cattle herder who lives with his family outside the city of Timbuktu. The city is controlled by a strict Muslim regime that imposes its will on the citizens of the town in increasingly draconian and absurd ways. Living among the dunes, Kidane and his family have mostly been sheltered from the violence and oppression of the city, but such peace cannot last long in this place.

Timbuktu has already had a good week. The first film from Mauritania to be nominated for an Academy Award, Sissako’s critically beloved drama about faith and freedom just won seven Caesar Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, including best feature and best director. This is the kind of important, hard-hitting film voters like to reward in this category for bringing a faraway struggle to light for the world to see.

Wild Tales (directed by Damián Szifrón) – Argentina has had the most success in this category of any of this year’s nominated countries with two previous wins, including as recently as 2009 for The Secret in Their Eyes. Szifrón’s odd, darkly comic anthology film had been tapped by some as the film to beat this year before the nominations were even released, but against this set of this set of films, Wild Tales seems perhaps the slightest and least likely winner.

Composed of six standalone stories, any one of which would have made an intriguing Best Live Action Short nominee, Wild Tales is a simultaneously thought-provoking and humorous meditation on violence and vengeance. Despite its often dark subject matter, Szifrón’s film is easily the most enjoyable sit of the five nominated pictures just from an entertainment standpoint, and that cannot be underestimated when it comes to guessing what Academy voters may choose.

Tangerines (directed by Zaza Urushadze) – Tangerines reminds more than a little of 2001 Best Foreign Language Film winner No Man’s Land, which also concerns soldiers from opposing sides of a conflict trapped together in the middle of a battlefield. Writer-director Urushadze throws in the added twist that the combatants are being housed by a neutral third party, raising questions about the nature of war and the reality of collateral damage.

An Estonian village is caught in the middle of an uprising against the Georgian government. The village is deserted, except for two men, one of whom will leave as soon as he has harvested his tangerine crops. After a particularly bloody battle, the wounded are left behind in the village, and Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) takes them into his home. It is a classic story about two sides of a conflict finding they have more in common than they would have thought, helped along by someone caught in the middle who sees the absurdity of it all. Tangerines is the first film from Estonia nominated in this category and certainly fits on this list.

The final analysis

Though Wild Tales is the most outright enjoyable of the nominees just for delivering the wild ride its title promises, voters tend not to be swayed by such considerations when making their choices. Plenty of popular films from well known directors have been nominated in this category but went home empty-handed because voters opted for more challenging or esoteric choices. If any film is going to surprise in this group, Timbuktu is the most likely candidate.

Ida is the frontrunner here, having picked up the majority of the early season awards, though Leviathan earned the Golden Globe for best foreign language film. Leviathan’s Golden Globe triumph stands as my single favorite moment of the Oscar season thus far, and if it pulls off the mild upset with the Academy, it would be easily my favorite win of the night. Ultimately, the low-key charms of Ida should rule the day.

Will win: Ida

Should win: Leviathan

Wish it had been here: Force Majeure

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary Short

Polish documentary short Joanna is one of the most beautiful films of the year.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Documentary Short

The nominees are:

Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1

Joanna

Our Curse

The Reaper

White Earth

Worlds apart, two fathers return home from work, one smelling of oil and the other of death. In Poland, a young mother faces her coming death not with fear for herself but for what will happen to her son and husband after she is gone, while another young mother faces the reality that her son may not live through the night. In the U.S., one staff of heroic men and women dedicates its days and nights to ensuring that thousands of families remain intact in the face of a mental health crisis.

This year’s documentary shorts take on big themes of family, death, loss, and hope, all in the span of 40 minutes or less. Among them, one deals with the macro issue of veterans health care, while another focuses on the micro issue of one woman’s death. Still others are more impressionistic, philosophical, and open ended.

No approach is necessarily better, and no topic is necessarily more important than any other. It is all about perspective, and the great thing about the documentary shorts is how concisely and elegantly the directors are able to share their perspectives. In less time than it takes to watch an episode of television, these directors take us inside the lives of people we may never meet but in whom we can recognize ourselves.

Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 (directed by Ellen Goosenberg Kent) – In a year in which American Sniper has captured the zeitgeist to the tune of more than $300 million in box office receipts, six Academy Award nominations, and countless media think pieces, it seems to me one of the most vital issues raised by the film has been one of its least talked about aspects. I cannot speak to the rest of the world’s successes or failures, but the U.S. has a shameful record when it comes to veterans care.

A metaphor made plain in Crisis Hotline, we have no problem paying to equip our soldiers for going to war, but we balk at the necessary sacrifices to equip them for coming home. The call center chronicled in Crisis Hotline is the only one of its kind in the U.S., handling calls from veterans dealing with PTSD, depression, and thoughts of suicide, among other mental health issues. The counselors who operate the phones are as much heroes as the men and women of the armed services they try to help.

Rather than give a general outline of what they do and how, the film focuses on a handful of real calls – shown in real time – from veterans contemplating suicide, intercut with brief interviews with the counselors and their supervisors. The statistics flashed in the film are staggering, but the point is driven home by listening to these counselors interact with people who have reached the end of the line and see nothing but darkness ahead of them.

Joanna (directed by Aneta Kopacz) – Simple, beautiful, and life affirming, even as it confronts the tragedy of death, Joanna is the story of a young wife and mother who is diagnosed with cancer. Using no voiceover and just one opening and closing title card, the film slowly reveals itself to be a meditation on what it is like to reach the end of your life in the middle. Joanna has a 5-year-old son whom she dotes on constantly and loves deeply, even in the times when he clearly irritates her, as any young boy might annoy his weary mother.

Joanna has a blog, which she writes for her son so that he may have something of her and a guide for living without her when she is gone – an eventuality that seems to be coming sooner than anyone thought. As she approaches the end, the simple things appeal to her most such as taking the kayak out, picking mushrooms, and watching her son ride a bike for the first time. She tells her husband she is not afraid to die. She is afraid to leave him and her son by themselves.

Photographed by Lukasz Zal, who is nominated this year for Best Cinematography for his work on Ida, the film is the most beautiful of this group and one of the most beautifully shot of the year. Scenes come in and go out of focus as Joanna and her family’s attentions drift back and forth between the trivial matters of the day and the inevitability of her fate.

As an assignment for school, her son asks what her favorite thing to do is, and she says, “Spending time with you.” He corrects her and says the assignment is to find out what she likes to do by herself. She thinks a moment, then says she does not like to be alone. As someone facing down the prospect of death, it is understandable now more than ever why she would not want to be alone. Through one woman’s story, the film serves as a potent reminder to all of us to enjoy the time we have and to try to spend it with those we love.

Our Curse (directed by Tomasz Sliwinski) – Obviously without meaning to be, the other Polish short documentary in the lineup serves as a kind of mirror to Joanna. The film concerns two parents – the father is also the film’s director – whose son is born with a rare condition that causes him to stop breathing when he falls asleep. Instead of staring down the end of a life, as in Joanna, the parents in Our Curse are facing the beginning of a life that could come to an end at any time.

With honesty, humor, and an unflinching eye for detail, Sliwinski documents his and his wife’s daily struggle with a child they could lose at any moment. The couple talks about their fears, their doubts, and their hopes openly and without vanity. They set themselves up to be judged when they feel bad for themselves and for their disabled child, but the beauty of the film is how it makes the audience want to empathize with this family rather than judge them. None of us can say for sure that faced with the same situation, we would not react as they do. When the whole of the film is revealed, it becomes clear we should hope to act as this family does – adversity or not.

The Reaper (directed by Gabriel Serra) – Efrain is known as The Reaper. He works in a slaughterhouse in Mexico and is the man charged with putting the cattle to death. Truth be told, I was wary of the prospect of another documentary about how my meat gets to my table. There is nothing necessarily wrong with documenting the origins of our food, but it feels like well trodden territory. However, The Reaper is not a story of meat. It is a story of life and what it is like to take a life for a living.

If I have done the math correctly, Efrain has killed more than 1.5 million bulls in a career he stumbled into by accident. As the film asserts and Efrain confirms, you cannot be a party to that much death without it staining your soul in some way. He has dreams of cattle telling him it is his turn, and he says he knows these are not normal dreams to have. Day in and day out, he brings death to animals he says he recognizes feel the same pain and fear we do, as he would.

Efrain’s personal story is paired with static shots of the process of the slaughter. We see hooks and chains, conveyor belts and tunnels, and everywhere pools of blood. The images are striking, not just for their evident brutality but for how commonplace it all seems. When Serra shows us in great detail how the skin is pulled from the carcass of a bull, it appears no more troublesome than peeling apart a Velcro strap. Death is just part of the day here, nothing more, and that familiarity with death is perhaps the most troubling thing of all.

White Earth (directed by Christian Jensen) – It is no coincidence probably that White Earth is the shortest of the nominees in this category – clocking in at just 20 minutes – and also feels like the least developed. Jensen’s film concerns the residents of White Earth, N.D., an oil boom town that we are told was home to 60 people 60 years ago. Today, 500 people live there. Seen mostly through eyes of oil rig workers’ children, White Earth is an intriguing study of what life is like for people who feel as though they have no options but those placed in front of them.

Few people are White Earth natives. Most moved for the promise of jobs and money, and while the job part has mostly worked out, the money has not flowed as they might have hoped. Many of the children go through their lives with minimal contact with their fathers, who may spend weeks or months in the oil fields without coming home. One child does not even attend school and muses that he does not care about the oil industry now, but when he turns 18 and it is time for him to take a job in the fields, he will probably start to care. It is a town built on dreams that seems devoid of hope.

The final analysis

Predicting the shorts categories is always a fool’s errand, and predicting the Documentary Short winner is most difficult of all. There is little to go off in the way of precursor awards, as almost all of these had their premiers at small film festivals. So, guessing what will win generally comes down to guessing voters’ emotional responses to the nominated films.

Joanna is the most openly emotional story, followed closely by Crisis Hotline. Crisis Hotline benefits from being a topical American issue and added relevance thanks to American Sniper. White Earth has proven popular but may be too slight to win. Ditto Our Curse and The Reaper, though they only seem slight if you are not paying attention. Ultimately, this is the most wide-open race of Oscar evening, but I would say Crisis Hotline has a slight edge.

Will win: Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1

Should win: Joanna