Contenders Film: International Kicks Off Today With 29 Films, Oscar Submissions Galore

Jaclyn Philpott has been named executive director of the Association of Film Commissioners International – a newly created post that she’ll assume on January 3. As the new leader of the organization, she succeeds former AFCI President Eve Honthaner, who stepped down in September for personal reasons.

EXCLUSIVE: In October, Breaking Glass Pictures acquired Mario Martone’s Nostalgia, Italy’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar for North America, and today we have a first look at the official trailer (check it out above). 

For quite a few years, a belief held sway that bereavement consisted of a series of five – or was it seven? – stages, starting with shock and moving through to acceptance, after which you were more or less home free. Of course, no human emotion runs so smoothly, grief least of all. The various members of the family in Martijn de Jong’s Narcosis feel anger, anguish and denial by turns and sometimes simultaneously, each of them cocooned in their own sac of misery, unable to say what they feel, even to themselves. Grief here is as messy and resistant to resolution as it is in real life. 

Philip Yung delivers an ambitious decade-spanning true crime thriller with Where The Wind Blows, Hong Kong’s entry for the International Feature Oscar. Previously known as Theory of Ambitions, it’s a technically impressive feat with an equally impressive cast lead by Aaron Kwok and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Fast-paced and dense with detail, it challenges the audience to keep up with its complex story of two cops rising up the ranks in Hong Kong in the 1960s and beyond.

Deadline on Thursday launched its streaming site for Contenders Film LA3C: Conversations With Contenders, the awards-season event that took place Saturday as part of the lineup of the LA3C culture and music festival in downtown Los Angeles.

A camera pans slowly around a modestly comfortable living room. Here is the kitchen corner, with its microwave, coffee machine and jars of newly preserved tomatoes. Here are the inherited cabinets, one full of the best china, one full of books. And now, here is a wall that doesn’t exist any more. Torn plaster and broken wood frames a vast portal to the rolling steppes. There is a single road across those grasslands. It leads to Russia.

“I had never heard of this guy, and I would be the kind of person who would know about the most prolific serial killer in the U.S.,” The Good Nurse director Tobias Lindholm said of the real-life Charles Cullen, played by Eddie Redmayne in the Netflix film.  

I was joined at today’s Contenders Film LA3C event by the key people behind the hit epic The Woman King, which was just named to the prestigious list of AFI’s Top 10 Movies of the Year. It also scored a rare A+ Cinemascore during its opening weekend in September, proving it has not only critical acclaim but also that from the audience. The funny thing is this story of a band of all-female African warriors defending their kingdom in the 1800s was turned down by every studio the filmmakers approached until they finally got a yes from Sony’s TriStar Pictures. It was a smart move for the studio as it clearly has an Oscar contender here.

Deadline’s signature Contenders event hits downtown Los Angeles on Saturday for a hybrid in-person/virtual edition, partnering with the inaugural LA3C, the cultural festival developed by Deadline parent company PMC.

Looks like a good old fashion cash grab celebrity endorsement has become a bit more fraught when it comes to the digital marketplace nowadays.

Deadline on Wednesday launched its streaming site for Contenders Film: Documentary, the award-season showcase that took place Sunday with creatives from 20 of the year’s buzziest non-fiction movies.

Deadline on Monday launched its streaming site for Contenders Film: International, the annual awards-season showcase of the buzziest movies in the hunt for the International Feature Oscar.

Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary awards-season event kicks off Sunday at 8 a.m. PT and promises to open up distant lands and even a distant planet—no passport required.

It’s rare that a sequel competes in the International Oscar category, especially when the first part didn’t get selected. It’s a measure of Erik Matti’s latest film that, though it follows on from 2013’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight title On the Job—or rather, starts in the aftermath—this second instalment stands alone. “The big difference between the two,” said Matti, “is that the first one was set in urban Manila, and the second one is set in the countryside of the Philippines, just to show two contrasts that exist within both worlds.”

Multiple Oscar winner Alejandro González Iñárritu has returned to his Mexican roots with Netflix’s Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. While there are some personal elements in the film, it is not an autobiography, rather what he prefers to call an “autofiction.”

Winner of the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Lukas Dhont’s follow-up to the transgender drama Girl is another moving study of a difficult adolescence. Speaking at Deadline’s Contenders Film: International award-season event, he described the film as the story of two best friends Léo and Rémi.

Polish maestro Jerzy Skolimowski calls EO, winner of the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize and just this week the Best Foreign Film award from the New York Film Critics Circle, “practically a road movie” whose POVs from the titular donkey “were the most effective element of the whole filming and editing.”

Director and co-writer Carla Simón tells a story that’s close to her heart in Alcarràs, Spain’s entry for the International Feature Oscar race. The tale of peach farmers facing eviction and losing more than their home won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year.

UPDATED, 8:16 AM: Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans will receive the Vanguard Award at the 2023 Palm Springs Film Festival’s gala in January.