UPDATE (Feb. 24): The Counterfeiters has won the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film of 2007.
Four of the five movies nominated for Best Foreign Film at this year’s Academy Awards are either directly or peripherally concerned with war; three are period pieces.
The nominees are:
- Beaufort (Bufor), Israel, directed by Joseph Cedar
Based on a novel by Ron Leshem, this film about the heartbreaking banality of armed conflict in the absence of any real stakes tells the story of Israeli soldiers in 2000 Lebanon, where they are defending an outpost – an outpost that the troops know, even as they risk death, will be abandoned in a matter of days.
NYU film school graduate Joseph Cedar is no stranger to acclaim; his 2004 Campfire (Medurat Hashevet) swept the Israeli Film Academy Awards for that year, and he won the 2007 Berlinale Silver Bear award for Best Director for Beaufort.
- The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher), Austria , directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky
The movie, based on the true story as recounted by author and camp survivor, Adolf Burger, details the exploits of a group of skilled forgers at Sachsenhausen chosen for a Nazi counterfeiting operation. Help the Nazis win the war? This group has other ideas.
Ruzowitzky has visited the war theme before. His 2001 comedy, All the Queen’s Men, stars the cross-dressing team of Eddie Izzard and Matt LeBlanc as WWII Brits trying to infiltrate enemy lines to capture the Enigma machine.
Ruzowitzky is also the director of the med-school thriller franchise, Anatomie.
- Katyn (Post mortem. Opowiesc katynska), Poland, directed by Andrzej Wajda
Katyn is the forest where, during WWII, Stalin had more than 20,000 Polish army officers slaughtered. Literally unspeakable under the Soviet regime, the events of the era are brought to life by Wajda, whose father was a victim of the massacre. Wajda centers his story on a captain, Andrzej, and the wife who hopes against all evidence that her husband is alive.
Wajda won a César Best Director and BAFTA Best Foreign Language Film for 1983’s Danton. He also has an honorary 2000 Oscar “for five decades of extraordinary film direction,” as well as a Palme D’Or for a film that also received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, 1981’s Man of Iron (Czlwiek z zelaza).
- Mongol, Kazakhstan, directed by Sergei Bodrov
This is the story of the early life of Genghis Khan, during the period when he was a slave who went by the name of Temudgin: Motorcycle Diaries meets The Lion King?
Art-house movie lovers will remember Bodrov’s best-known film to date, the 1999 Catherine Deneuve vehicle, East-West (Est-Ouest).
- 12 (12 razgnevannyh muzhchin), Russia, directed by Nikita Mikhalkov
Widely discussed as the Russian 12 Angry Men, this is indeed something of a remake of that film, with much more heavily political overtones. A Chechen teen in contemporary Russia is accused of killing his Russian stepfather, and the various jurors, each with his own social agenda, are tasked with determining the teen’s fate.
Mikhalhov, whose brother wrote the lyrics to the Russian national anthem, has had the most significant brush with the Academy Awards of any of this year’s nominees: His 1994 Burnt by the Sun (Utomlyonnye solntsem) won the award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes (though not the Palme D’Or, which went to Pulp Fiction, reportedly to Mikhalhov’s extreme pique).
