Georgia nominates 'Corn Island' film for Oscars

Georgia has nominated locally directed-internationally produced film Corn Island to compete in the prestigious Oscars film awards.

Corn Island, an almost wordless story about an aging farmer and his granddaughter pitted against nature and a lingering ethnic conflict, has been submitted to be nominated for the foreign-language film category.

Earlier this week a Georgian war-time drama film titled Mandarinebi (Tangerines) was nominated by Estonia to be submitted in the Best Foreign-Language Film category at the prestigious American film awards.

Corn Island was directed by local man Giorgi Ovashvili and was a co-production between Germany, France, Hungary and Kazakhstan. It wowed critics at July's Karlovy Vary Film Festival where it won the $25,000 Crystal Globe top prize.

Set on the far Eastern fringes of modern-day Europe on an island in a river that divides Georgia from separatist territory Abkhazia, where a bloody civil war was fought in the early 1990s, the film featured images of a mist-woven forest and distant mountains as a background for the story of a man pitted against nature and human opponents.

The film, chosen for the Oscars by a special committee that included members of the Government as well as cultural and film industry organisations, was the latest in a run of award-wining Georgian films.

Levan Koguashvili's film Blind Dates, which was also shortlisted by the Georgian committee, and last year's Georgian Oscar contender In Bloom by Nana Ekvtimishvil and Simon Gross, were honoured at festival kudos worldwide in the past year.

Meanwhile, just because a Corn Island was nominated by Georgia did not necessarily mean it will be inserted into the Oscars program. Each film must go through a strict judging process before it is even accepted as a candidate in the awards ceremony program.

The deadline for Oscar submissions is October 1 and successfully nominated films will be announced on January 15, 2015. The Academy Awards ceremony is scheduled for February 22 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.