Second-round voting at the Bafta Film Awards closes on Friday (January 10) at 6pm GMT – a vital stage of the awards where the category longlists (typically of 10 titles) will reduce to actual nominations (mostly five or six per category).
However, the number of categories where voters get to have their say in round two is notably paltry, especially since juries take over to determine nominations in documentary and outstanding British film, as well as casting.
One major category where rank-and-file voters do determine nominees is film not in the English language – as long as they opted into the relevant chapter before Bafta voting opened.
Among the 10 films longlisted, there are six that made the Oscar shortlist in the equivalent category, having been selected by their home country to compete for the Academy Award. Those six are: Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez (France), Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow (Latvia), Magnus von Horn’s The Girl With The Needle (Denmark), Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here (Brazil), Rich Peppiatt’s Kneecap (Ireland) and Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed Of The Sacred Fig (Germany). Our guide to all the films that made the Oscar shortlist for international feature is here.
At the Baftas, any film that has a majority of dialogue not in the English language is eligible to compete in this category, as long as it has received or is to receive a timely UK cinema release. That means that many films that were not chosen by their home country to compete for the international feature film Oscar were eligible, and four have made this Bafta longlist: Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, Guan Hu’s Black Dog, Alaxandre de La Patelliere and Matthieu Delaporte’s The Count Of Monte Cristo and Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera.
A year ago, it was a similar scenario: Bafta voters longlisted five of the films that were competing that year for the international feature Oscar, plus five other titles (such as The Boy And The Heron and The Eight Mountains). In round two, voters nominated three of the Oscar contenders (Argentina’s Society Of The Snow, Ukraine’s 20 Days In Mariupol and the UK’s The Zone Of Interest) plus two other titles: Anatomy Of A Fall and Past Lives. The Zone Of Interest won the award.
In round-one voting, voters are not expected to have seen all the eligible titles – 40 were entered this year for film not in the English language. That gave a competitive advantage to widely seen films such as Kneecap and Emilia Perez (which both landed on Bafta’s best film longlist, and on multiple other longlists), and also to La Chimera, which grossed a handy £946,000 at UK and Ireland cinemas for distributor Curzon. The Count Of Monte Cristo grossed a decent £471,000 for Entertainment Film. All We Imagine As Light was released last December, and has reached £322,000.
Now that the longlist has been published, anyone voting in the nominations round must watch all 10 films in order to do so – effectively creating a level playing field between all the competing titles.
Bafta’s director longlist this year features Jacques Audiard for Emilia Perez, Alice Rohrwacher for La Chimera and Payal Kapadia for All We Imagine As Light, which indicates voter enthusiasm for those films, at least among the directing chapter. All We Imagine As Light, Emilia Perez and Kneecap all made the Bafta longlist for either adapted or original screenplay.
The wordless Flow is longlisted for animation – but the overlap between the opt-in chapters for animation and film not in the English language is presumably not that great, so this may not signify.
For the other films – Black Dog, The Count Of Monte Cristo, The Girl With The Needle, I’m Still Here and The Seed Of The Sacred Fig – this is the sole category where they have achieved Bafta longlist inclusion.
Voters who are also catching up on seeing titles on the best film longlist may find they have a busy viewing schedule ahead of tomorrow’s voting deadline. Thanks to the Bafta View platform, it’s not too late to plug those final viewing omissions.
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