The winner of Kazan Muslim Film Festival is submitted to the Oscars
The Malaysian movie Redha won a number of awards at the XXII Kazan International Muslim Film Festival this September. Now the film is submitted to the Academy Awards longlist as a candidate for becoming the Best Foreign Language Film. However, this is the very beginning.
Redhawas chosen to officially represent Malaysia at the 89thAcademy Awards commonly known as Oscars, reports Free Malaysia Today. Although the movie of a female director Tunku Mona Riza has not been a box-office success, it has been acclaimed by the audience as well as by the critics. The film is to increase public awareness about autism. 'I want Redha to be a movie that represents the voice of families with autistic children and what they have gone through to bring them up,' Riza told the Daily Sun. The film's scenes are based on true experiences.
Redha tells the story of an autistic boy and his parents trying to get used to son's peculiarities. The film was awarded the Special Prize of the President of Tatarstan 'For the Humanism in the Cinematography', the Special Prize of the Russian Guild of Cinema Critics, and the prize for the best male role at the XXII Kazan International Muslim Film Festival. The film will represent Malaysia at the Fourth Casa Asia Film Week in Barcelona, Spain and at the 10th Asia Pacific Screen Awards in Brisbane, Australia next month.
In fact, the submission of the film means inclusion in the longlist of about 80 movies (every year each country can submit one film). Then the committee of several hundred Academy members forms a 9-film shortlist, which is later transformed into five official nominees.
'There is still a long way to go to pass through the stages. It's a very very long shot to win. The Oscars are very prestigious, so even a top five nomination at this pinnacle of world movie awards, would be quite an achievement. We are hoping that our universal theme film will help take us as high up that ladder as possible,' said Redha's Executive Producer Ku Mohamad Haris.
The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film exists since 1947 and it is mostly given to European films. Over the years, only 5 of 68 Awards were given to Asian films. Malaysia submitted its films in 2005, 2013 and 2015, but none of them got into the shortlist. Russia was nominated 6 times.Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun won the Academy Award in 1994. This year Russia submitted Andrei Konchalovsky's Paradise.