The 2025 Oscar nominees for the 97th Academy Awards have been unveiled by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the list of the five films in the running for the best international feature film award includes one first-ever nominee in the category, namely Latvia. Its debutant in the international Oscar race is Flow, an animated feature from director Gints Zilbalodis that follows a flood-displaced cat who must team up with other animals in search of survival and a new home.
Flow is also in the running for the best animated feature Academy Award.
At the Golden Globes, the Sideshow/Janus film vanquished much higher-profile competition — including Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot, Disney/Pixar’s Inside Out 2, Netflix’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl and Disney’s Moana 2 — to win the best animated feature honor.
The other previously unnominated countries on the shortlist of 15 international Academy Award hopefuls had been Senegal and Thailand, but they didn’t make the final cut.
The other movies competing for the best international feature honor this year are Brazil’s I’m Still Here from director Walter Salles, the story of a broken family’s resistance; Denmark’s Magnus von Horn-directed black-and-white historical thriller The Girl With the Needle; France’s entry Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s Netflix genre mash-up that is a transgender coming-of-age story as much as a Mexican crime thriller musical; and Germany’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, the Iran-set drama from exiled director Mohammad Rasoulof.
Ireland’s awards season darling Kneecap, Rich Peppiatt’s cheeky rap comedy featuring Michael Fassbender, was among those missing out on a spot in the final five.
A total of 85 countries had submitted features for the best international feature film Oscar this time around. The qualifying international features represented a full range of global cinema, from the political drama of Brazil’s I’m Still Here to the period horror of Austria’s contender The Devil’s Bath and Denmark’s The Girl With the Needle, to the surreal delights of Canada’s Universal Language.
The Academy Awards ceremony will take place on March 2 at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.
English (US) ·