Oscars 2024 Best International Feature Film: what are the five nominated movies for the Academy Awards?
The finalists in this category are films from the United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, Italy, and Germany. The surprise omission, France’s decision not to send ‘Anatomy of a Fall’.
It’s often said that when a magician shows you one hand, it’s because the trick is happening with the other. As the curtain rises at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, the world’s gaze will fixate on the American West Coast, presuming that the epicenter of cinema lies beneath the Hollywood sign.
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Whether that statement holds true is up for debate. Meanwhile, as American cinema takes center stage, it’s worth turning our attention to what other film industries are producing beyond the United States’ borders. This recognition is precisely what the Academy’s Best International Film category celebrates—the magic pulled from the hat, the ace up the sleeve. Here are the nominated films.
‘The Zone of Interest’
The UK’s entry to the Oscars is one of those films that periodically surface to remind us of the varied emotional landscapes that World War II narratives can explore. Directed by Jonathan Glazer and loosely based on Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, it recounts the life of Rudolf Höss’s and his family, achieving success at every festival in which it has participated and becoming a favorite for this year’s Oscars.
Höss, a Nazi lieutenant colonel and the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, lived idyllically next to the camp, now the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, with his wife Hedwig and their five children. Their dreamlike existence was shadowed by the screams, gunshots, and sounds of trains and furnaces leaking through their windows. Two worlds, two Hösses. One reality. One story.
‘Perfect Days’
Credit goes to Wim Wenders for transforming the mundane into a work of art. Japan’s Oscar entry, featuring a powerful performance by Koji Yakusho, tells the day-to-day life of Hirayama, a content bathroom cleaner who finds joy in his thankless job, ending his day with a drink (its nature is immaterial) at his favored bar and some reading. All the while, the din of Tokyo is serenely muffled by Wenders’s touch.
It’s an ode to the aesthetic, a silent gem divided into two parts that encapsulates the stoic worker’s journey to find balance—a motif that resonates throughout the film—and his near departure from it. The message is a life lesson: hope as a tattoo, optimism as cinema.
‘The Society of the Snow’
It may sound clichéd, but Bayona has done it again. Turning a tragedy into a masterpiece where humanity matches magnificence, especially when the latter is as breathtaking as the Andes and the former as raw as survival, is no small feat. Spain’s Oscar contender recounts the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571′s disaster in the Andes.
The director from Barcelona plunges the audience into complete immersion with a meticulous script and an unforgiving setting. The mountain speaks in silences. It’s an intimate tale and a declaration of life that the filmmaker bellows from the depths of the Valley of Tears.
‘Io Capitano’
Italy’s submission tells a story often lost in the silence one imagines dominates the desert. A human drama centered on two young Senegalese men, Seydou and Moussa, forced to leave their home in Dakar with the sole aim of reaching the promised land of Europe.
Matteo Garrone ensures the audience feels the suffocation of crossing the vast sandy expanse—facing the horrors of a detention camp along the way—before switching sand for water droplets to confront the agony of seeking supposed salvation across the Mediterranean.
‘The Teachers’ Lounge’
Germany’s offering is a portrait of pressure, a nerve-wracking thriller focused on young idealist math and PE teacher Carla Nowak, embarking on her first job at a seemingly calm and peaceful high school. Far from it.
Following a series of thefts at the school, Nowak dives into solving the crimes. However, the deeper she goes, the louder and more uncomfortable the voices of outraged parents, stubborn colleagues, and aggressive students become. The relentless wall of the school system’s structure encloses an injustice that suffocates the audience like a broken elevator.