United States:Ireland's first entry for the best foreign-language film Oscar, Kings, has not made the shortlist from which the five nominees for the award will be chosen. A bilingual film substantially in the Irish language, Kingsdeals with the troubled lives of Irish emigrants who went to work in London in the 1970s.
Kingshas received 14 nominations for next month's Irish Film and Television Awards, including best Irish film, best director (Tom Collins), best actor (Colm Meaney) and best supporting actor (Donal O'Kelly and Brendan Conroy). The film was released in Ireland last September.
In a very competitive year for the foreign-language film Oscar, 63 countries submitted national entries. There were many surprises when the shortlist of nine films was announced yesterday. The Romanian abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, now on release in Dublin, was the most unexpected exclusion. The winner of the Palme d'Orat the Festival de Cannes last year, it had been widely tipped to take the Oscar.
Another Cannes prizewinner, the French entry, Persepolis, was also considered a front runner for the Oscar, but also failed to make the shortlist. Directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, this animated film is based on Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novels about a precocious girl growing up in Tehran after the Islamic revolution. Festivals screening the film have received protests from Iranian embassies.
The only one of the nine shortlisted films that has been released in Ireland is the Austrian entry, The Counterfeiters, a factually based drama set in a Nazi concentration camp.
The other films on the list include Russian entry 12, directed by Nikita Mikhalkov who won the foreign-language film Oscar in 1995 for Burnt by the Sun.
Representing Italy is the new film from Cinema Paradisodirector Giuseppe Tornatore, The Unknown, a white slavery drama. Veteran director Andrzej Wajda, who is 81 and made such notable films as Ashes and Diamondsand Man of Iron, represents Poland with his new film, Katyn.
Completing the shortlist are Mongol(Kazakhstan), The Trap(Serbia), The Year My Parents Went on Vacation(Brazil), Beaufort(Israel) and Days of Darkness(Canada).
The complete Oscar nominations will be announced next Tuesday.