Academy Rejects Bulgaria’s International Oscar Submission ‘Mother’

deadline.com:

Mother, the Bulgarian submission for this year’s International Feature Film Oscar race, has been deemed ineligible by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The film’s director, Zornitsa Sophia, announced the decision on social media this week.Academy sources confirmed to Deadline that Mother has been rejected due to more than 50% of the spoken dialogue track being in the English language.In her post, Zornitsa Sophia, whose 2004 film Mila From Mars was Bulgaria’s Oscar entry that year, explained that Mother‘s producing team had reached out to the Academy asking for clarification of the eligibility rule, which stipulates that “the recording of the original dialogue track as well as the completed picture must be predominantly (more than 50%) in a language or languages other than English.”She said that the Academy’s response was that eligibility is determined by timing the duration of the English and non-English dialogue, so two members of her team, using stopwatches, independently clocked the length of the dialogue tracks.

One of them measured the film’s non-English (Bulgarian, Swahili, Maasai) dialogue as being 30 seconds longer than the English dialogue; according to the other person, the gap was 1 minute, 35 seconds in favor of non-English speech.Confident that the film fit within the Academy’s requirements, the team submitted Mother for Oscar consideration earlier this month.The other contenders that competed against Mother for the country’s nomination included SpeculatorS (director Georgi Kostov), Escape (director Viktor Bojinov), In the Heart of the Machine (director Martin Makariev), To Put It Mildly (director Anri Kulev, animation), Petya of My Petya (director Alexander Kossev), Fishbone (director