It isn’t November yet, the time of the year when the Oscar season begins, and we already get to see big Hollywood studios and small independent production houses champion their films to make the cut for the Academy Awards or the Oscars, as they are popularly called. In case of international films vying for a spot for ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ category, the Oscar fever has already taken a strong hold. Most countries submitted their films in the last week of September to meet the October 1 deadline. Nepal’s submission this year is ‘Panchayat’, a coming-of-age film on menstrual taboo set in a rural village during the Panchayat period. The movie is directed by Shivam Adhikari and features veteran Nepali actor Saroj Khanal and Neeta Dhun­gana. Its chances of getting noticed and making it to the final shortlist look not only dim but pitch black.

The film released in March this year to lukewarm critical response and negligible commercial collec­tion. It had disappeared without a trace until it was announced as Nepal’s official entry to the Oscars. Surprisingly, Panchayat was one of only three films that actually applied to the Nepali selection committee. The other two were Samten Bhutia’s Maoist-insurgency based ‘Tandro’ and Japanese filmmaker Toshiaki Itoh’s ‘My Love: Promise for Kath­mandu’ that dealt with the 2015 Nepal Earthquake.

Just like Panchayat, the two films had no commercial or critical track record to be proud of. In the absence of real competition, the selection committee has the right not to submit a film for the year, but our committee nonetheless chose to hand a token victory to one film out of a tiny pool of mediocre films.

This is rather disappointing because the last two films to rep­resent Nepal—Min Bahadur Bham’s ‘Kalo Pothi’ (2016) and Deepak Rau­niyar’s ‘White Sun’ (2017)—at least had a visible presence at some of the world’s high-tier film festivals and enjoyed good coverage not only in national dailies but in international press as well. Both Bham and Rau­niyar had received various inter­national film funds to make their films and collaborated with foreign producers who hustled to help the directors get festival attention and crack international distribution deals. That still wasn’t enough.

Even when our films are in a slightly better position to compete, the Academy’s tricky and controver­sial selection process makes sure it trips us short of the final shortlist. At present the Academy picks its final nominations for Best Foreign Language Film through a two-phase filtration process.

In the first phase, all the eligi­ble submissions are viewed by the category specific award general committee members who cast a secret ballot. The top six choices are determined from these votes, while the executive committee of Foreign Language Film Award has been bestowed a special power to select three additional films, thus putting out a final shortlist of nine. In the second phase, the award com­mittee members view the films from the shortlist and votes are taken to determine the final five nominees for the category.

The general members of the Foreign Language Film committee have a history of favoring European films. Since 1958 European countries have swept the award 56 times while non-European ones have managed to win it only 14 times. As a response to the Euro-bias criticism, the afore­mentioned executive committee was formed in 2008 to help make an eclectic set of nominations. But the elbowing out of non-European films is still very much visible, as generally three out of five nominees are still films from France, Italy, Spain, Ger­many, Sweden or Hungary.

For small films coming from small countries like Nepal, European films will remain heavyweight con­tenders. And it’s not that European dominance has always hampered Nepal at the Oscars. Actually Nepal owes a lot to France for its only Oscar short-list, ‘Himalaya’ (which is popularly known here as ‘Cara­van’). ‘Himalaya’, directed by Eric Valli, was a French production and before 2005, countries were only allowed to submit films in their offi­cial language. This barred France from submitting the film, which had Tibetan and Nepali languages, as its own entry. So to apply for Oscars, the production company was forced to register it from Nepal—a country submitting a film for the first time. In 1999, Valli was already a reputed documentary filmmaker and had been nominated for an Oscar seven years before. That led to the film’s recognition during the voting and its eventual nomination.

Thus we don’t deserve to bask in the glory of ‘Himalaya’, and call it our nation’s cinematic achievement at the Oscars. We didn’t rightful­ly earn it and such luck won’t be repeated again. If Nepal wants a serious shot at the Oscars, our film development body must play an active role. It should grow up from its passive role of just submitting films. Our films need right amount of promotional funding to make them competitive. It will take tre­mendous amount of PR and theatri­cal screenings for the voting jury to actually value our film.

These goals are to be achieved in the long run. In the meantime we need a national film funding system that extends Nepali films’ global outreach and grooms filmmaking talent. There is no shortage of tal­ent here. Missing are programs that help local directors make art house movies and guide them to brand Nepali films in big league film fes­tivals like Venice (where White Sun premiered). Until and unless we have more Min Bahadur Bhams and Deepak Rauniyars, Oscars would remain a pipedream! o