Japan picks Cannes Palme d’Or winner ‘Shoplifters’ as Oscar entry

Image: Gaga Corporation/Wild Bunch via AFP Relaxnews

Japan has put forward Palme d’Or winner and box office smash “Shoplifters” as its entry for the Best Foreign Film category at the 91st Academy Awards.

Family drama “Shoplifters” is to represent Japan on the longlist for Best Foreign Film ahead of the 2019 Oscars.

Palme d’Or winner at the 2018 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, it brought its writer, editor and director Hirokazu Kore-eda a second Cannes accolade in five years, following the 2013 success of “Like Father, Like Son”.

It follows the fortunes of a family living in poverty and one which, despite having to shoplift in order to scrape by, opens their home to an abandoned orphan girl.

Cannes’s 2016 Palme d’Or winner, “The Square”, was one of five films on the subsequent Best Foreign Film Oscar shortlist. Similarly, Michael Haneke’s “The White Ribbon” was the German submission for 2009 and made it to the final five, as did Laurent Cantet’s “The Class” for France the year before.

Haneke’s “Amour” was the most recent Palme d’Or winner found worthy of the Foreign Film Oscar, having won it for Austria in 2012.

Best Foreign Film submissions are announced according to a pre-arranged schedule, with the South African, Colombian and Ukrainian selections due on Aug. 29, and Germany’s on Aug. 30.

Iran, whose Asghar Farhadi has directed two Best Foreign Film winners (“A Separation” 2011, and “The Salesman” 2016), is to make known its choice on Sept. 1. All submissions are to be made known before Oct. 1, 2018.

The 91st Academy Awards take place on Feb. 24, 2019, with nominations announced a month before on Jan. 22. JB

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