Hungary, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina enter the Oscars race

As the submissions for the 89th Academy Awards mount, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia have become the latest countries to enter the film festival’s foreign-language film category.

Hungary, which won the Oscars’ foreign-language film category earlier this year with the film Son of Saul, a drama about the Holocaust set in Auschwitz concentration camp, has entered Kills on Wheels. Having made its debut at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in July, Kills on Wheels is a dark, disability-focused comedy about a paralysed firefighter and his wheelchair-bound friends.

Croatia’s entry is the gripping psychological thriller On the Other Side, which explores the notion of forgiveness through the main character, a middle-aged nurse, Vesna, who is contacted by her war criminal husband 20 years after he left her.

The submission for Bosnia and Herzegovina is the latest film from Bosnian director Danis Tanovic, whose earlier film No Man’s Land won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2002. Death in Sarajevo, which premiered in the Berlin Film Festival’s main competition category and won the Grand Jury Prize, is a dark satire set at an ailing hotel where world leaders are convening for the 100th anniersary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; the event that ignited the First World War. Beset with problems and with the hotel staff who have been unpaid for two months, preparing to strike, the tale is a biting allegory of modern Europe.

Earlier submissions from central and eastern European countries include Georgia’s House of Others and Romania’s Sieranevada.

Source: Variety