List of Singaporean Submissions For The Academy Award For Best Foreign Language Film - Submissions

Submissions

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has invited the film industries of various countries to submit their best film for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film since 1956. The Foreign Language Film Award Committee oversees the process and reviews all the submitted films. Following this, they vote via secret ballot to determine the five nominees for the award. Below is a list of the films that have been submitted by Singapore for review by the Academy for the award by year and the respective Academy Awards ceremony.

Three of Singapore's five Oscar submissions - Be With Me, My Magic, and Tatsumi were directed by Eric Khoo. Both films were among the first Singaporean films featured at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Be With Me features four interconnected stories, with virtually no spoken dialogue. The majority of the story is told in English subtitles reflecting the thoughts of the deaf and blind lead actress, Theresa Chan. It was accepted by AMPAS as the official entry from Singapore but subsequently disqualified for being more than 50% in English and not in a Foreign Language. My Magic tells the story of the relationship between an alcoholic Indo-Singaporean magician and his young son.

The other two Singaporean submissions were large-scale musicals. In 1959, Colonial Singapore sent musical-drama The Kingdom and the Beauty, set in Imperial China. Directed by a Hong Kong based-Mainland Chinese director and produced by the famed Hong Kong Shaw Brothers film studio, there was minimal Singaporean input in the film-making. Nearly fifty years later, independent Singapore sent 881, a candy-colored musical-comedy-drama about a pair of Singaporean sisters who aspire to become champions at traditional Singaporean getai. This "uniquely Singaporean" film became the highest grossing Singaporean film of 2007 and was released commercially in Japan but it won few awards overseas.