"Spitak" left off Best Foreign Language Film Oscar shortlist

PanARMENIAN.Net - From a field of 87 submissions to the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category, nine movies have now advanced to the shortlist.

Among the films left off the list is "Spitak", a movie by Russian filmmaker Alexander Kott about the devastating earthquake that hit Armenia in 1988.

At the center of the feature film is protagonist, Gor (Lernik Harutyunyan), who returns to Spitak, the city that was at the quake’s epicenter, to find his wife and daughter, who he left behind to pursue a new life in Moscow.

What he finds are locals and their relatives struggling to find their loved ones — dead or alive — amid heaps of rubble, debris and bodies.

Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” from Mexico, Pawel Pawlikowski’s “Cold War” from Poland and Nadine Labaki’s “Capernaum” from Lebanon were on the Oscars shortlist and are all favorites to be nominated.

Also on the list, from Japan, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or winning film “Shoplifters” and Lee Chang-dong’s South Korean film “Burning,” which stars Steven Yeun. Rounding out the list were Colombia’s “Birds of Passage,” Denmark’s thriller “The Guilty,” Germany’s “Never Look Away,” and Kazakhstan’s “Ayka.”