Fire at Sea is in the running for an Oscar, after winning the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and being screened at a number of American festivals, such as Telluride, Toronto, New York and Chicago. The selection committee met this morning and chose Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary on migrants landing on the island of Lampedusa from a shortlist of seven titles. Italy’s chosen film will then have to make it onto the shortlist of nine films that will be announced on 17 January 2017, after which we’ll have to sit tight to see if it becomes one of the official five Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film, which will be announced on 24 January 2017 along with the other nominees. The 2017 Oscars award ceremony will then be held on 26 February.
Produced by Donatella Palermo and Gianfranco Rosi through 21Uno Film and Stemal Entertainment with the Istituto Luce-Cinecittà and Rai Cinema, Fire at Sea was co-produced by Les Films D’Ici and Arte France Cinema, and has already been sold practically all over the world by French company Doc & Film International. On 21 October it will be released in American theatres, accompanied by a retrospective on the work of the director at the Lincoln Center in New York. At the Berlin Film Festival, jury president Meryl Streep referred to it as ‘a film worthy of an Oscar’ as she handed over the Golden Bear.
(from Cineuropa.org – Camillo De Marco)
