AwardsWatch - Belarus enters Foreign Language Film Oscar race first with Karlovy Vary premiere ‘Crystal Swan’

Belarus enters Foreign Language Film Oscar race first with Karlovy Vary premiere ‘Crystal Swan’

Belarus is the first country out of the gate to officially submit for the Foreign Language Film Oscar race for the 91st Academy Awards with Crystal Swan.

Crystal Swan takes place in 1990s Belarus, where a wanderlust young DJ (Alina Nasibullina) is derailed by a typo in a forged US Visa application, forcing her to a backwater village where she is determined to fake her way to the American dream. It is the feature film debut from Darya Zhuk and was written by Zhuk and Helga Landauer.

The film is the first FLF entry from the Eastern European nation in 22 years and only its third ever. It is the first for director Darya Zhuk. It premieres at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival tonight, Saturday, June 30th.

The last two years Switzerland has been the first country to announce. Keep an eye on my first Foreign Language Film Oscar predictions coming next week.

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.