Nine features will advance to the next round of voting in the Foreign Language Film category for the 86th Academy Awards. Seventy-six films had originally been considered in the category.
The films, listed in alphabetical order by country, are:
- Belgium, The Broken Circle Breakdown, Felix van Groeningen, director
- Bosnia and Herzegovina, An Episode in the Life of an Iron Picker, Danis Tanovic, director
- Cambodia, The Missing Picture, Rithy Panh, director
- Denmark, The Hunt, Thomas Vinterberg, director
- Germany, Two Lives, Georg Maas, director
- Hong Kong, The Grandmaster, Wong Kar-wai, director
- Hungary, The Notebook, Janos Szasz, director
- Italy, The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino, director
- Palestine, Omar, Hany Abu-Assad, director
Notable omissions from the shortlist include Asghar Farhadi's The Past, starring Berenice Bejo and Wadjda from Saudi Arabia. While Abdellatif Kechiche's lesbian drama Blue Is the Warmest Color won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, it was not released in France by Sept. 30, the cut-off date for eligibility for this year's entries.
Nominees for the foreign film category are being determined through a two-step process. In the first phase, several hundred L.A.-based Academy members screen the original submissions and the group's top six choices - augmented by three additional selections voted by the Academy's Foreign Language Film Award Executive Committee - constitute the shortlist.
The shortlist will be cut down to five nominees by specially invited committees in New York and Los Angeles.
The 86th Academy Awards nominations will be announced live on Thursday, January 16, 2014, at 5:30 a.m. PT in the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater.
