‘My Sweet Land’ Team on Their Doc Being Pulled as Jordan’s Oscar Entry Due to Pressure From Azerbaijan: ‘This Means That Censorship and Silencing Can Win’

variety.com:

Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Jordan recently pulled the documentary “My Sweet Land” as its official entry for the Oscars best international feature film race after receiving pressure from Azerbaijan, in a blatant case of a country bowing to censorship dictated by diplomacy. “My Sweet Land” follows the life of an 11-year-old boy named Vrej who dreams of becoming a dentist in Artsakh, an ethnic Armenian enclave within the Nagorno-Karabakh region of southwestern Azerbaijan.

For three decades, the enclave has been at the center of an intermittent war that ended in 2023 with an Azerbaijani offensive that caused a mass exodus of the ethnic Armenian population.

The government of Azerbaijan now seems to want to erase all traces of their conflict with ethnic Armenians in the disputed region — and Jordan was apparently willing to comply with that.

As “My Sweet Land’s” Jordanian-Armenian director Sareen Hairabedian tells Variety, “We don’t understand why Azerbaijan would be able to pressure a country like Jordan and control a narrative that is coming out of Jordan for this film to be stopped and silenced.” Representatives for Jordan’s Oscars committee did not respond to Variety‘s request for comment.