I attempted to post some of this as a comment at peacepalestine (HaloScan didn’t allow it) in response to information appearing there concerning the rejection of Saverio Costanzo’s film “Private” by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences as Italy’s contender for the Best Foreign Language Film award. The Academy claims it doesn’t qualify because the language spoken is not predominately Italian and states further that “involving subcultures that speak a non-English, non-official language may qualify if their subject matter concerns life in the submitting country.”
“Private” has already won awards and critical praise. It is about a Palestinian family’s interaction with Israeli soldiers who confiscate their home as a “strategic lookout point”. Refusing to go quietly they resist creatively and peacefully. Arabic, Hebrew, and some English are spoken by the cast.
thecutter asks those well versed in film, “Have all films that have been submitted been done in the language of the country of origin?” She’s come up with a few that were not. In 2002, AMPAS intended to reject Elia Suleiman’s “Divine Intervention” saying “Palestine was not a country recognized by the Academy” so the film was never submitted. The Academy then claimed it had no official position since the film was never submitted. Many protested including “Gaza Strip” director James Longley who “threatened to return his student Academy Award over the incident.” So far this go round the protesters include producer Aurelio DeLaurentiis who has “decided to withdraw his film “Manuale D’Amore” (“Manual of Love”), which was tipped as an early favorite, from consideration.”
According to this article the film was shot in Calabria, not Palestine, due security reasons. Costanzo did “spend six months in Palestine/Israel collecting material.” He’s quoted as saying the writers “while writing partly imagined that we were writing an Italian story about the Nazi occupation. We didn’t want to tie in with the cultural identity of the occupied territories, trying to universalise the emotions. The fear for example doesn’t have to be the fear of a Palestinian child, but can simply be fear, so whether French, German, or Palestinian it doesn’t change.” It would appear that AMPAS fears the universalising of these emotions, in that, some things never change.