The following 31 films, all from different countries, were submitted for the 61st Academy Awards in the category Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The bolded titles were the five nominated films, which came from Belgium, Denmark (winner), Hungary, India and Spain.
The Dutch submission, the thriller The Vanishing, was disqualified by the Oscar committee. AMPAS complained that less than 50% of the dialogue in the film was in Dutch, and that French was the majority language. Although the film was made by the Netherlands with a French-Dutch filmmaker and a mixed cast (mostly Dutch), AMPAS deemed that the film was not suitable to represent the Netherlands. The Netherlands declined to send another film, leaving them unrepresented for the first time since 1972.
The Soviet film was filmed in 1967, but was banned for twenty years.
| Country | Film title used in nomination | Language | Original name | Director | IMDB |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Argentina | The Debt | (Spanish) | La Deuda interna | Miguel Pereira | |
| Austria | Undiscovered Country | (German) | Das Weite Land | Luc Bondy | |
| Belgium | The Music Teacher' | (French) | Le Maître de musique | Gérard Corbiau | |
| Brazil | The Story of Fausta' | (Portuguese) | Romance da Empregada | Bruno Barreto | |
| Bulgaria | Where Do We Go? | (Bulgarian) | А сега накъде | Rangel Vulchanov | |
| Canada | The Revolving Doors | (French) | Les portes tournantes | Francis Mankiewicz | |
| China | Red Sorghum | (Chinese) | 红高粱 | Zhang Yimou | |
| Cuba | Letters from the Park | (Spanish) | Cartas del parque | Tomás Gutiérrez Alea | |
| Denmark | Pelle the Conqueror (winner) | (Danish) | Pelle erobreren | Bille August | |
| Dominican Republic | A One-Way Ticket | (Spanish) | Un Pasaje de Ida | Agliberto Meléndez | |
| France | La Lectrice | (French) | La Lectrice | Michel Deville | |
| West Germany | Yasemin | (German) | Yasemin | Hark Bohm | |
| Greece | In the Shadow of Fear | (Greek) | Στη σκιά του τρόμου | Yiorgos Karypidis | |
| Hungary | Hanussen | (Hungarian) | Hanussen | István Szabó | |
| Iceland | In the Shadow of the Raven | (Icelandic) | Í skugga hrafnsins | Hrafn Gunnlaugsson | |
| India | Salaam Bombay! | (Hindi) | Salaam Bombay! | Mira Nair | |
| Israel | The Summer of Aviya | (Hebrew) | הקיץ של אביה | Eli Cohen | |
| Italy | The Legend of the Holy Drinker | (Italian) | La Leggenda del santo bevitore | Ermanno Olmi | |
| Japan | Hope and Pain | (Japanese) | ダウンタウン・ヒーローズ | Yôji Yamada | |
| Mexico | The Last Tunnel | (Spanish) | El Último túnel | Servando González | |
| Netherlands | The Vanishing (DISQUALIFIED) | (Dutch) (French) | Spoorloos | George Sluizer | |
| Nicaragua | The Spectre of War | (Spanish) | El Espectro de la guerra | Ramiro Lacayo-Deshon | |
| Norway | The Ice Palace | (Norwegian) | Is-slottet | Per Blom | |
| Peru | The Mouth of the Wolf | (Spanish) | La Boca del lobo | Francisco J. Lombardi | |
| Poland | A Short Film About Love | (Polish) | Krótki film o milosci | Krzysztof Kieslowski | |
| Portugal | Hard Times | (Portuguese) | Tempos Difíceis | João Botelho | |
| Puerto Rico | Tango Bar | (Spanish) | Tango Bar | Marcos Zurinaga | |
| Spain | Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown | (Spanish) | Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios | Pedro Almodóvar | |
| Switzerland | La Méridienne | (French) | La Méridienne | Jean-François Amiguet | |
| Taiwan | My Mother's Teahouse | (Chinese) | 春秋茶室 | Kun Ho Chen | |
| Soviet Union | Commissar | (Russian) | Комиссар | Aleksandr Askoldov | |
| Yugoslavia | My Uncle's Legacy | (Serbo-Croatian) | Život sa stricem | Krsto Papić |
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, academy, foreign, language and/or film:
“My list of things I never pictured myself saying when I pictured myself as a parent has grown over the years.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike—and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two—are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.”
—Harold Bloom (b. 1930)
“... in every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more white women who can read and write than all Negro voters; more American women who can read and write than all foreign voters.”
—National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is “only words” and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“[Film noir] experiences periodic rebirth and rediscovery. Whenever we have any moment of deep societal rift or disruption in America, one of the ways we can express it is through the ideas and behavior in film noir.”
—John Briley (b. 1925)