Ukraine to Be Represented at Oscars 2025 by the Film La Palisiada
At a meeting on 9 September, the Ukrainian Oscar Committee chose the film that will represent Ukraine at the 97th Academy Awards of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The announcement was made on the Committee's Facebook page.
Ukraine will be nominated in the Best International Feature Film category for Philip Sotnychenko's film La Palisiada.
In addition to it, three other films took part in the national selection: ‘House of the Word. An Endless Novel' by Taras Tomenko, 'We Were Recruits' by Liubomyr Levytskyi and 'Peaceful People' by Oksana Karpovych.
The film that will represent Ukraine at the Oscars 2025 was chosen by 14 members of the Oscar Committee.
‘The members of the Committee reviewed the submitted films in detail, and the discussion was heated and constructive. As a result of the voting, La Palisiada was selected as a contender. We wish the representative every success in the Oscar race!’ said Dmytro Sukholytkyi-Sobchuk, Head of the Ukrainian Oscar Committee, director.
‘La Palisiada is Philip Sotnychenko's feature debut. The film's creators call it post-Soviet noir. The events take place in Ukraine in 1996, a few months before the signing of Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provided for the abolition of the death penalty.
The film tells the story of a forensic psychiatrist who is to take part in the investigation of the murder of a policeman. Law enforcement officers are in a hurry to close the case before the death penalty is abolished, but the doctor is not sure of the defendant's sanity. And when he sees how forensic experiments are conducted on the suspect, he begins to doubt the transparency of the law enforcement system.
The filming took place in Zakarpattia region and Kyiv. They used a special technology that combines retro film images with modern digital technologies.
The film stars Andrii Zhurba, Novruz Hikmet, Oleksandr Parkhomenko, Valeriia Oleynikova, Olena Mamchur, and Oleksandr Maleev.
The film had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival. There, the film was presented in the main competition and won the FIPRESCI award.
As The Gaze previously reported, this year in Los Angeles, the Oscar jury recognised the Ukrainian film 20 Days in Mariupol by Mstyslav Chernov as the best feature documentary, which tells the story of the realities of the beginning of a full-scale Russian war in Ukraine. The film won Ukraine its first ever Oscar award.
*Cultural Diplomacy