Currently browsing the "Academy Award winner" tag.
A Separation
Posted by Arty Chick on March 8, 2012 · Twitter · Facebook · Reddit
A Separation won the 2011 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, marking Iran’s first Academy Award ever. It was also nominated in the Best Original Screenplay category, unusual for any foreign film. While the world frets about their nuclear intentions and tension mounts, it is nice to see a fairly non-political depiction of life there. This is a film about relationships and cultures and power and truth, pretty universal themes played out on a very human scale and directed with a masterful hand.
El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in their Eyes)
Posted by Arty Chick on June 21, 2010 · Twitter · Facebook · Reddit
El Secreto de Sus Ojos was the very deserving winner of the 2010 Academy Award for best Foreign Film. (I have to admit it is the only one of those nominated that I have seen so far, so stay tuned.) It is both an absorbing crime thriller and a heartbreaking love story. Set in Buenos Aires, in the years between 1975 and 1999, the central character Benjamín Espósito is played by Ricardo Darín who reminds me of a Latin Alan Rickman, and I LOVE Alan Rickman. Darín is the same kind of sensitive, sensual actor.
The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen)
Posted by Arty Chick on March 20, 2010 · Twitter · Facebook · Reddit
This first feature won Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck the Oscar in 2007 for Best Foreign Film and I can see why. What a wonderful film! It takes place in East Germany in 1980s and concerns a successful playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his gorgeous actress girlfriend (Martina Gedeck) who are put under surveillance by Stasi, the secret police, in order to find something to use against the writer because a high ranking minister has a thing for the actress and wants him out of the way. Their apartment is bugged and an agent is set up in the attic listening to their every conversation, taking notes, making reports. Friends come and go and anything they say may be used against them without any court of law. But it is mostly just regular old boring conversation. Then a dear friend, a talented but blacklisted director, kills himself and the writer feels compelled to say something. So he decides to write a piece for Der Spiegel in West Germany, thereby putting himself directly in the police state’s sights if they find out who wrote the piece. The article is about how the East Germans decided to stop keeping statistics on suicides.
