Zornitsa Sofia’s film was rejected due to over 50% English speaking
The Bulgarian Oscar nominee “Mother” was rejected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the United States. This is what director Zornitsa Sofia Popgancheva wrote on Facebook. The news of her was announced today by the director of the National Film Center, Petar Todorov, after the NFC received a letter from the academy yesterday. She says that “Mother” has a few more minutes of English than the 50% allowed for “international characteristic”, in which category she was sent to compete.
“According to these reports, we are not an international film, despite our international team, some definitions have changed several times in recent years”, the director is indignant. Remember that “nowhere on the Academy website does it explain exactly how this speech is measured, and after we wrote them in the most polite way to guide us – if we were to count the subtitles or the words and letters of the given language, they he replied with “duration” and two people on my team, with two stopwatches each, measured the speech in the film with an approximately equal result, that is – one with 30 seconds and the other colleague with 1:35 more for ” non- English language “, ie Bulgarian, Swahili and Masai adverb”, also writes Zornitsa. In the comments below the post, the author of “Mother” receives unanimous support from the native film community, who briefly calls the Academy’s judgment “stupid”.
Zornitsa Sofia recalls that the presence of the English language in “Mother” is conditioned by the authentic story of the heroine: she goes to work with abandoned children in Kenya, where “by chance no one speaks Bulgarian”. “The film isn’t American, as far as I know. But according to the Academy, it’s not even international. It could be alien,” jokes the director.
The term “Best International Film” at the Oscars has existed since 2020. Until then “Best Foreign Language Film” was chosen, with the criteria remaining the same: only the name has changed. The purpose of this category is to shed light on smaller, more unpopular filmmaking and languages other than the industry’s dominant English. In rare cases, films in Italian, French, Chinese and Korean languages, originally “reserved” for films in English (not just US), also entered the main competition categories. Sometimes they also win, but for small countries the only field of expression is the category of foreign languages.
Of Zornitsa Sofia’s four feature films, two were chosen nationally to represent us at the “Oscars” – in 2005, her debut “Mila from Mars” was in this position. This year, “Mother” beat “In the Heart of the Machine”, “Petya to My Petya”, “Stock Players”, “Softly Speaking”, “Shakespeare as a Street Dog”, “φ 1.618” and “Herringbone “in the internal selection. The film was selected by a jury led by Oscar-nominated actress Maria Bakalova. It was not without the regular scandal on local soil: Viktor Bozhinov withdrew his “Escape” due to a “conflict of interest” with one of the members of the commission and also stumbled after being replaced by another.
Foreign language Oscar nominations close on October 3, so it’s still possible that “Mother” could be replaced by another film. The NFC has announced that the now famous commission will meet in a new meeting and examine the remaining applications in order to broadcast a new Bulgarian proposal.
The premiere of Zornitsa Sofia’s film in our country is on September 24 in Varna, where she will compete at the “Golden Rose” festival. Participations in the Warsaw and Cottbus festivals followed. In Sofia we will be able to see him on November 17th at the NDK, at the opening of “Kinomania”.
–
