For Your Consideration?
The Band’s Visit
The Band’s Visit is a comic fish-out-of-water tale about members of the Ceremonial Police Band of Alexandria Egypt finding themselves stranded in Israel. Well received by critics and audiences at film festivals all around the world, Israel’s official submission for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film was recently rejected by the Academy because it contained too much English. The filmmakers argued that English is the common language in the Middle East between people who speak Arabic and Hebrew. It was further argued that the English is heavily accented, frequently broken and requires subtitling, but to no avail.
Audiences in Los Angeles will have a chance to decide for themselves when The Band’s Visit begins a one-week run at Laemmle’s Music Hall tomorrow (Friday, December 7, 2007).
Los Angeles and New York frequently see limited screenings of foreign films in December as everyone jockeys for Academy attention. An Oscar nomination (and hopefully a win) is seen as one of the keys to a foreign film’s success in the United States. The Band’s Visit isn’t scheduled to open until February 2008 so maybe it was booked prior to its rejection by the Academy.
Also screening this week is South Korea’s official submission Secret Sunshine. It’s playing Laemmle’s Sunset 5 and you can read my capsule review of it when it played AFI here.
Filed under: News, Upcoming
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