The 95th awards ceremony will take place on March 12, 2023, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has already announced the list of nominees for the award. In the category of the best international film, a Polish production has a chance to win the statuette.
I am talking about “IO” directed by Jerzy Skolimowski. The picture will compete for an Oscar with the German “No change in the West”, the Argentinian “Argentina, 1985”, the Belgian “Close” and “The Quiet Girl”.
“IO” by Jerzy Skolimowski nominated for an Oscar 2023. What is the film about?
The Polish film is an allegorical story that brings closer the reality of animal life in the modern world. We see the world through the eyes of the title donkey IO, who travels a long way from the Polish circus to the Italian slaughterhouse. The only person the animal trusts is its trainer Kassandra, with whom they have to part ways at the beginning of the story.
“It is a panoptic of human behavior towards a defenseless animal, a suggestive picture of social relations and cultural changes taking place in the modern world,” wrote WIFF, which co-financed the production.
Oscars 2023. Polish film with a chance for a statuette
The director of the Oscar-nominated film explained why he decided to raise the subject of animal rights in his film with the following words:
In today’s world, there are drastic transports of Polish horsemeat to Italy. The horses are transported alive, tightly packed in trucks, in completely inhumane conditions, and some of them die during this transport. The hero of my film is rescued in Italy from such a transport and experiences even the happiest moments of his life, which, however, end dramatically. We want to move the viewer so that the film is a protest against the cruelty of people towards animals.
After the announcement of the nomination, Skolimowski explained why he presented the suffering of animals from the donkey’s perspective:
“I was hoping that the donkey, whose face is not too expressive, would be a silent, passive witness to various episodes from human life, and that its mere presence would be a kind of commentary on human situations,” the artist explains.
The screenwriter and producer Ewa Piaskowska emphasized that with this film they wanted to convince the viewer to look at the world from the donkey’s perspective and increase the level of empathy with the animal.
Source: Gazeta
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