This year’s ZFF program is bursting with candidate films competing for an Oscar nomination in the best foreign film category. Our main program proudly presents as many as five of them: the Bosnian and Herzegovinian Our Everyday Life, the Czech Home Care, the Danish A War, the Hungarian Son of Saul and the Icelandic Rams.
Our Everyday Life focuses on the life and collapse of an average family from Sarajevo in the post-war Bosnian society. Told through the traditional Bosnian sevdah song, destinies and emotions of the protagonists paint a familiar and commonplace picture, one of those stories we encounter all around us.
The Czech 2015 Oscar candidate Home Care is a bittersweet humorous drama about facing death, told in the bubbly style of Czech comedy-drama. Director Slávek Horák set the plot in his hometown of Zlin, shooting at his parents’ home and garden. The result is an intimate and natural atmosphere of accentuated authenticity.
Danish director Tobias Lindholm proved an expert in the anatomy of human psyche under pressure. A War, his second fiction film, is an uncompromising study of an unsolved war crime committed by a military unit in Afghanistan.
The Hungarian Oscar candidate, Son of Saul, has already won a host of awards, including a Grand Prix in Cannes and a Jury Special Mention at Sarajevo Film Festival. This outstanding debut by Béla Tarr’s former assistant Lászlo Nemes is a portrayal of a quest for redemption in the heart of hell, told through a story of a Hungarian member of Sonderkommandos, the unit of Jewish prisoners in charge of taking the prisoners to gas chambers and incinerating bodies.
The Icelandic candidate, Rams, the winner in Un Certain Regard in Cannes, leans on a story of two brothers who have not spoken in years. Heart-warmingly, with a touch of subtle, wry humour, it makes a record of deeply rooted rural culture inextricably linked with Icelandic national spirit. All this against the backdrop of amazing northern landscape.
In the section Together Again we screen this year’s Romanian Oscar candidate, Aferim!, by a well-known director Radu Jude, a double ZFF winner (his feature debut The Happiest Girl in the World earned him a special mention in 2009, and humorous drama Everybody in Our Family the Golden Pram 2012). The story is set in 1835 Romania and follows the local police office Costandin and his son Ionita in search of Carfin, a runaway Roma slave accused on having an affair with his master’s wife. Switching between action scenes and surreal dialogues, Jude masterfully inserts the analysis of political and religious eastern European 19th century landscape into the form of western, questioning in fact what went wrong in the histories of small eastern European nations.
The Lux Film Day section shows two Oscar candidates: the Turkish Mustang and Croatian The High Sun.
Mustang has won the Heart of Sarajevo for best film and depicts the girls in a remote Turkish village, accused of inappropriate sexual behaviour, drastically punished, and locked up in a house where they have to adopt housekeeping skills and prepare for marriage.
The Croatian candidate The High Sun has so far won a host of international awards, including Un Certain Regard in Cannes. It speaks about forbidden love, its frailty and strength. This cinematic tale spans three decades and is set in two neighbouring villages whose history is burdened by conflicts and intolerance.
The Oscar nominees will be announced in January 2016.