Why The Nigerian Film ‘Lionheart’ Was Rejected From The Oscars For Not Being Foreign Enough
By: Marie Eberle
Tags: Oscars, Film, Race, Movies, Cinema

Lionheart is directed by and stars Genevieve Nnaji, a Nollywood (the Nigerian version of Hollywood) veteran and icon. Nnaji portrays the story of a woman, who struggles to assume the reigns over her family’s transportation company. The film is a deeply captivating snapshot of life, class, misogyny, and politics of the people living in the Niger delta. On the face of it, it’s the perfect submission for international feature film Oscar, but it has just been disqualified from the race — because there is too much English in it.

This comes just a few months after the Academy changed the name of this category from “foreign language” to “international feature film”, since it considered the former to have become “outdated”. But it failed to change the actual rules of this particular race: The Academy still only allows films competing in this category that are longer than 40 minutes, produced outside the U.S.A., and feature a predominantly non-English dialogue track.

And with this seemingly simple rule, countries who inherited English from their British colonisers, such as most of anglophone West Africa, are excluded from qualifying for international feature film Oscars.

This decision is not just ridiculous—placating American ideas about what qualifies as international by forcing countries to submit films in languages that are not authentic to their lived reality — it is also stupid: Nollywood box office revenues increased by 36% last year. West-Africa has a huge burgeoning market for the film industry and a giant pool of acting talent. If the Academy wants to stay a global player in the movie industry, it has to acknowledge the film industry in Nigeria and beyond.

And yet, Hollywood still struggles to account for the colonial past of this stretch of the world.

The decision to exclude Lionheart from the category quickly attracted ire from across the film making community.

Ava DuVernay on Twitter

If the Academy Awards want to continue to allow movies to compete in a category that highlights and uplifts films portraying international stories, it should remove the clause about the English language. The U.K., an immediate frontrunner in this case, could still only submit one contender — and already does so, for example with this year’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, a film in English and the Bantu language Chichewa, directed by and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor in his feature directorial debut.

And in any case, the idea that the U.K. would immediately beat any other film in that category because of the power and talent within their filmmaking industry is quickly becoming outdated.

If the Oscars want a category that features only non-English language films, it should create that category — and stop forcing international competitors to skirt their own native language if it happens to be English.

The conflation of international features with non-English languages erases centuries of British colonial heritage, and serves no one but the placation of American ideas about “foreign-ness”.

The next Oscars ceremony will take place in 2020 — let this one be the one that finally acts like we’re in the 21st century.