Two films involving unusual Jewish characters have been submitted as Oscar entries.
“Félix et Meira,” about a love affair between a French-speaking Quebecer and a young Hassidic Jewish mother, is Canada’s entry for the Academy Award’s best foreign-language film.
Israel’s entry is “Baba Joon,” the story of familial conflict among three generations of Iranian Jewish men. The film, which is in Farsi, won best picture on Sept. 21 at the Ophir Awards, Israel’s version of the Oscars. It also won in four other categories: art direction, music, costume design and casting.
“Félix et Meira” also has collected a number of awards since its premiere at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival.
“When we started working on Félix et Meira in 2011, we never imagined that the movie would be so successful once it was finished,” said director Maxime Giroux. “The process to secure funding for the project was particularly difficult, but we never questioned the potential of this unique film. And we were right to think that way: Not only has the movie won close to 20 film festival prizes, it’s also been sold to some 15 territories internationally and was a hit with Canadian audiences when it was released in theaters in the winter of 2015.”
Movie critics have praised the film’s sensitive depiction of Canada’s little-known Hassidic community, a portrayal that owed much to the research undertaken by the director and his co-writer, Alexandre Laferrière.
The selection was announced Sept. 25 by Telefilm Canada, which chairs the pan-Canadian Oscar selection committee.
“Baba Joon” was directed and written by Yuval Delshad, an Iranian Israeli, and features Iranian-born actors.
A shortlist of nine films will be announced at the end of December, and on Jan. 14 the Academy will vote to nominate five films in each category. The 88th annual Academy Awards ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on Feb. 28, 2016. — jta & pr/newswire