It takes a Dogtooth to heal the wound

These are raving days, it makes you cry and makes you laugh with what Greece is through. Distressed, penniless, miserable and lover of the official chaos, my country has little to offer speaking of material resources, but, then, why do you think my motto is "art will save us" ? Obviously, because nothing else could.

With ultimate pleasure and enthusiasm it is -- tears falling down my eyes and my heart beat imitating an ecstatic African drum -- that I am able to state that Dogtooth (Canine for french distribution and Kynodontas / Κυνόδοντας for us), being already short-listed as one of the 9 most prominent films in the Best Foreign Language Film category, it actually made it through. It is, weirdly enough, one of the 5 films to contest in the Academy Awards --a greek film, it has been a while we didn't see that, since Kakogiannis. Some call the film doomed and they are maybe right in principle: how come that what we know as a conservative and abiding by the American values film race ever had the guts to nominate such an avant-garde film that triumphed in Un Certain Regard category in Cannes on 2009 and being able to shock or least to bring uneasy feelings in many of its misplaced mainstream viewers?

I pray and I pray that Christos Stergioglou, Aggeliki Papoulia and Hristos Passalis and first and foremost Yorgos Lanthimos will have the bliss to grab uncle Oscar and walk down a red carpet starting from Syntagma Square till Propylaia (γιατί είναι και κατηφόρα) but I'm already proud enough to know that I will see them on the red carpet in 33 days.

Congratulations and best of luck to all five candidates:

Biutiful, Mexico
Dogtooth, Greece
In a Better World, Denmark
Incendies, Canada
Outside the Law (Hors-la-loi), Algeria