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Keep track of all the submissions for best international feature at the 2023 Academy Awards.

Entries for the 2023 Oscar for best international feature are underway, and Screen is profiling each one on this page.

Scroll down for profiles of each Oscar entry

An international feature film is defined as a feature-length motion picture produced outside the US with a predominantly (more than 50) non-English dialogue track and can include animated and documentary features.

Submitted films must have been released theatrically in their respective countries between January 1, 2022 and November 30, 2022. The deadline for submissions to the Academy is October 3, 2022.

A shortlist of 15 finalists is...

History currently repeating itself lends a particular frisson to Latvian theater, opera and film director Viesturs Kairiss’ “January.” It takes place in early 1991, when the nation’s push for independence (alongside other Baltic states) met with armed Soviet resistance even as the Ussr was falling apart. Those historical events are interwoven with vaguely autobiographical fiction revolving around a mildly nonconformist Riga film school student, one admittedly drawn much as the director was himself in that time and place.

With Moscow leadership again hawkish toward retaining and/or regaining territories of a former empire, this flashback has particular resonance, amplified by the use of archival news and activist-shot footage. Less compelling, if still diverting, are the more conventionally indulgent, nouvelle vague-influenced scenes that comprise a Portrait of the Artist as a Sulky Young Man. The history lesson seems fresher than this protagonist’s stale angst — he is, frankly, a bit of a pill,...

“January,” Viesturs Kairiss’s autobiographical film set in the former Soviet Union, has been acquired for world sales by The Yellow Affair. The movie will have its world premiere at Tribeca in the international narrative competition.

The coming-of-age film sheds light on the political upheaval in the early 1990’s. It follows a Jazis, a 19 year-old aspiring cinematographer who, along with his friends, is trying to pursue his dreams of making movies and enjoy the freedom of young adulthood. His world is thrown into chaos as he is dragged into the people’s peaceful protests against the Soviet Army’s attempted takeover of power in his country.

Kairiss, who co-wrote “January” with Andris Feldmanis and Livia Ulman, said it was a highly personal film for him.

“I was 19 in January 1991, so I am very familiar with the protagonists and events of the film. At that age, I was fighting for my...

Cinema is a vehicle for investigating historical scars in “Isaac,” a starkly beautiful drama about a filmmaker who returns to his native Lithuania in 1964 to make a movie about a WWII slaughter, and becomes embroiled alongside his schoolmate in totalitarian trouble. Adapted from a short story by Antanas Skema, director Jurgis Matulevicius’ feature debut — Lithuania’s entry to the Oscar international feature race — is Its obliqueness may preclude it from attracting a wide domestic audience, but such haziness is part and parcel of a work about the lingering, lethal fog of war.

“Isaac” opens with the 1941 Lietukis garage massacre of 40 Lithuanian Jews at the hands of Nazis and their local mob-like collaborators. Shot in sumptuous black and white (as is two-thirds of the ensuing film), and with the sort of roving, wobbly, serpentine camerawork favored throughout by Matulevicius and talented cinematographer Narvydas Naujalis, this scene evokes the grimy brutality of “Son of Saul,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Karolis Kaupini's Nova Lituania is exclusively showing November 9 - December 8, 2020 on Mubi in the Debuts series.It starts as an idea, grows into a theory, and dies as a dream. It’s the late 1930s, and Lithuania is cornered by warring neighbors. Vilnius, the country’s capital, has long been gobbled up by Poland, and the growing tension between Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Russia will soon leave the tiny Baltic state in the middle of a crossfire. Pacing nervously in a semi-deserted lecture hall, geography professor Feliksas Gruodis points at a map of Lithuania, and one of Africa: “just like vast underpopulated areas of Africa once drew white colonists, so we are in the same position.” The solution? To build another state - better yet, to ship the existing one overseas, and found a colony where people...

Jurgis Matulevicius: 'The camerawork and lighting are very important to me and I spent a lot of time on that' Photo: Courtesy of Tallinn Black Nights The present is haunted by the past in Jurgis Matulevicius' smart and complex debut film, that mixes Cold War elements and soul-searching with a love triangle plotline and psychological thriller. It centres on a trio of of characters, film director Gediminas (Dainius Gavenonis), his old friend Andrius (Aleksas Kazanavicius) and Andrius' wife Elena (Severija Janusauskaite), whose lives are tied up to a lesser or greater degree with the death of a Jewish man, Isaac, in the Lietukis Garage Massacre. The film is adapted from a short story by  Antanas Skema, a Lithuanian author whose stream of consciousness approach you can feel in the fluidity of Isaac's narrative.

When we caught up with Matulevicius in Tallinn - where his film screened in the First...