Website and Trailer for Private: Italy’s 2005 Oscar Submission

Posted by Todd Brown at 6:59pm.

Posted in Trailer Alerts , Drama, Continental Europe & Russia, USA & Canada.

Well, this is unusual ... a foreign Oscar submission that local folk will have a chance to see before the Oscars. Saverio Costanzo’s Private has just been announced as Italy’s submission for the coming Oscars and Seattle’s Typecast Releasing will be opening the film domestically in New York and LA in November. It’s a bold choice for Italy, actually, as the film is remarkably non-Italian ... here’s a piece of the official synopsis:

“Inspired by real events, documentary filmmaker Saverio Costanzo’s feature debut is a minimalist psychological drama about a Palestinian family of seven suddenly confronted with a volatile situation in their home that in many ways reflects the larger ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel.

Mohammad, his wife and their five children live in a large, isolated house located halfway between a Palestinian village and an Israeli settlement. The house, in the crossfire of the two sides, is a strategic lookout point that the Israeli army decides to seize, confining the family to a few downstairs rooms in daytime and a single room at night. Mohammad refuses to leave his home and, reinforced by his principles against violence, decides to find a way to keep his family together in the house until the Israeli soldiers move on. ”

Private Website
Private Trailer (downloadable Quicktime 7)

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Reader Comments

Geert Jan 12/14/2005 @ 7:06am

An interesting article in today’s newspaper (De Volkskrant) about this film and three other Oscar sumbissions. Apparently the Italian submission ‘Private’ was declined by the Academy because most of the film is spoken in Arabic.

The other three movies that were declined are the Dutch ‘Bluebird’ and the submissions by Bolivia and Tadzjikistan (Dutch spelling, don’t know the English name of that country).

The Dutch movie ‘Bluebird’ was declined because it had aired on TV already. The producers told the Academy that the version that had aired on TV was a significantly different cut, but the Academy didn’t agree. The other two submissions were declined because they didn’t deliver the movies with English subtitles in time.
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