EFP’s LA Screenings present European Oscar® Submissions European Film Promotion spotlights 26 European films for the 89th Academy Awards
The Oscar® race is on and European Film Promotion (EFP), the leading organisation for promoting European films, is again offering Academy members, journalists, US distributors and international buyers a tailor-made opportunity to watch a great selection of 26 submissions for the Foreign Language Film Award category of the 89th Academy Awards. The respective EFP member organisations are cooperating to generate as much buzz as possible for this year’s Award season where, more often than not, the Foreign Language Oscar goes to a smaller European country – such as this year’s Oscar winner ”Son of Saul” from Hungary. The LA Screenings will be held from October 24 to November 6 at the Wilshire Screening Room in Beverly Hills. The campaign is supported financially by the Creative Europe – MEDIA Programme of the European Union and the participating EFP member organisations.
This year's submissions presented at the LA screenings show an exceptional range of genres. The award-winning Swiss Oscar submission My Life As A Zucchini by Claude Barras is the first time that a stop-motion animation feature film will have been part of the presentation. In addition, there will be screenings of such documentaries as the much lauded Fire At Sea by Gianfranco Rosi from Italy, which won the Golden Bear in the 2016 Berlinale's Competition, Luxembourg's Voices From Chernobyl as well as the highly political docu-fiction Houston, We Have A Problem from Slovenia, which uncovers a secret multi-million dollar deal between the US and Yugoslavia from the 1960s.
Quite a different approach to reflecting on recent history is taken by the UK submission Under The Shadow. Shot in Farsi, the directorial debut of Babak Anvari portrays the life of a mother and daughter in post-revolutionary Tehran in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war in the form of a classical horror thriller. The fact that dark subjects can also develop a lighter side, albeit with dark humour, is shown by the Serbian director Miloš Radović in Train Driver’s Diary which notes that, statistically, each train driver unintentionally kills 15 to 20 people during his working life. With its wide selection of genres and subjects, the Screenings are bound to provide unexpected surprises. Most of the films have taken part in the international film festival circuit, and many received awards, were critically acclaimed and feted by audiences around the globe. In addition, some of the films will be presented in person by their talent in order to give extra support for their respective films.
One artist who will be greatly missed is the legendary Polish filmmaker and Oscar winner Andrzej Wajda whose last film Afterimage is part of the LA Screenings. He passed away on October 9 aged 90.
Please see the full 2016 line-up below
The LA Screenings in are supported by the following EFP member organisations:
AFC - Austrian Films, Albanian Center of Cinematography, British Council, Bulgarian National Film Center, Croatian Audiovisual Centre, Czech Film Center, Estonian Film Institute, EYE International (The Netherlands), Film Center Serbia, Film Fund Luxembourg, Finnish Film Foundation, Flanders Image (Belgium), Georgian National Film Center, Greek Film Centre, Icelandic Film Centre, Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual I.P. / ICA (Portugal), Istituto Luce Cinecittà (Italy), Kosova Cinematography Center, Macedonian Film Agency, Ministry of Culture of Montenegro, National Film Centre of Latvia, Polish Film Institute, Romanian Film Promotion, Slovak Film Institute, Slovenian Film Center and Swiss Films.
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