A brief history of Canadian films competing at the Oscars

My Favourite Season is a monthly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that runs through the six-month "season" that is both his favourite and Moira Rose's. It explores all things awards in the lead-up to the big one: the Oscars, which are currently scheduled to take place on March 2, 2025.

Earlier this week, Matthew Rankin's film Universal Language did something no Canadian film has done in nearly a decade: it was shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. The last time that happened was in 2016, when Xavier Dolan's It's Only the End of the World made the list — though, back then, the award was still called "Best Foreign Language Film." So technically, Universal Language is the first Canadian film to ever be shortlisted for "Best International Feature."

This is a pretty exciting development for the Canadian film industry, and it could not be happening to a more deserving film. An absurdist comedy set "somewhere between Tehran and Winnipeg," Universal Language is a staggeringly original addition to the canon of Canadian cinema. Rankin has called it "an autobiographical hallucination" that's both about his hometown of Winnipeg and an homage to the Iranian cinema he loves — and that only begins to describe how much this film feels unlike anything that's come before it. 

I mean, this movie kinda has everything: a Tim Hortons reimagined as an Persian tea lounge; a man dressed up as an illuminated Christmas tree; a reference to a "Winnipeg Earmuff Authority"; and turkeys … so many turkeys. And now, it might also end up with an Oscar nomination? What a rare and wonderful thing!

We'll find out if Universal Language manages that feat when the Oscar nominations are announced on Jan. 17 (we're currently predicting it will, but we admit we're a little biased). If it does, it will be only the eighth time Canada has received a nomination for this award — whatever it may have been called at the time — in the six decades in which we've been submitting films. And this feels like a very good excuse for a little history lesson on what went down over those decades with respect to Canada's submissions, for better or for worse. 

Presenting a brief history of Canadian films and the Oscar category currently known as Best International Feature Film: 

The 1970s

The Academy Award for what was then known as the Best Foreign Language Film was established at the 29th Oscars back in 1957, and it's been given out every year since (before 1957, it was sporadically handed out as a non-competitive honorary award). The category is unique in that all countries outside of the United States are invited to submit one film that is primarily not in the English language for consideration each year, and if it ends up winning, the award is not presented to a specific individual but to the country itself. 

For example, the first competitive winner was Federico Fellini's La Strada. But Fellini himself didn't win that Oscar — the country of Italy did (fun fact: Fellini technically never won a competitive Oscar, despite four of his films winning Italy the award in this category).

Canada started submitting in 1971, with the inaugural choice being Claude Jutra's coming-of-age film Mon oncle Antoine, which is regularly ranked as one of the best Canadian films of all time. It was not ultimately nominated, perhaps for the best given the allegations that surfaced in 2016 that Jutra sexually abused minors (which led the Quebec film industry to rename their own annual awards). 

In fact, none of Canada's five submissions in the 1970s (they did not submit every year) were nominated, including Gilles Carles's The True Nature of Bernadette (in 1972), Michel Brault's Orders (in 1975) and Anne Claire Poirier's A Scream from Silence (in 1979). The latter was the first time Canada submitted a film directed by a woman (which has happened nine more times since).

The 1980s

Canada's first full decade of submissions kicked off with Francis Mankiewicz's 1980 film Good Riddance, which just last year was voted the 47th best film ever directed by a Canadian by a poll here at CBC Arts. It was one of two times in the 1980s that a Mankiewicz film was submitted, the other being the 1988 film The Revolving Doors. 

Neither was nominated, though fascinatingly Mankiewicz has some relatives who have fared much better with the Oscars. His father was a second cousin of both Joseph L. Mankiewicz (who won six Oscars, including for both writing and directing All Above Eve) and Herman J. Mankiewicz (who won an Oscar for co-writing Citizen Kane in 1941, and was played by Gary Oldman in the Oscar-winning 2020 film Mank).

Mankiewicz wasn't the only filmmaker who saw his work submitted multiple times over the course of the 1980s. Denys Arcand's was submitted twice as well, and on both occasions it resulted in actual nominations. With the 1986 film The Decline of the American Empire and 1989 film Jesus of Montreal, Arcand's work has the pretty extraordinary distinction of getting Canada its first and second nominations ever in this category, though on both occasions we would lose (to the Netherlands and Italy respectively).

The 1990s

This decade was a really exciting time for French-Canadian filmmaking, but unfortunately the Academy did not seem to agree! The entirety of Canada's submissions over the course of the '90s resulted in a total of zero nominations, despite films like Jean-Claude Lauzon's Léolo, Robert Lepage's The Confessional and Léa Pool's Set Me Free being among the options. 

They also passed on none other than Denis Villeneuve in back-to-back years when Canada submitted the anthology film Cosmos in 1997 (which Villeneuve co-directed alongside five others) and August 32nd on Earth in 1998 (which Villeneuve directed on his own). These two films would be the origin story for Villeneuve's long and storied relationship with the Academy (which has yet to result in an Oscar win, though he'll likely at least get another nomination this year for Dune: Part Two).

Also notable this decade was the fact that Canada submitted a film that was not in French for the very first time. There are no rules as to what language a country has to submit its films in, as long as it's not in English. So in 1991, Canada submitted Attila Bertalan's A Bullet in the Head, a war film with dialogue entirely in an invented language. 

This meant that by the end of the 20th century, Canada had submitted 25 films: 24 in French, one in a language that doesn't exist, and none in any Indigenous language whatsoever. Thankfully, that would soon change.

The 2000s

The first decade of the 21st century saw Canada submit films directed by some of the greatest white male filmmakers to ever come out of Quebec: Villeneuve for Maelström (in 2000), Lepage for Far Side of the Moon (in 2004), Jean-Marc Vallée for C.R.A.Z.Y. (in 2005) and Xavier Dolan for I Killed My Mother (in 2009). And while none of those resulted in nominations, we had better luck with the undeniable Canadian G.O.A.T. in this category, Denys Arcand. 

In 2003, his film The Barbarian Invasions resulted in the first (and still only) time Canada won this award. And then in 2007, when the Academy started announcing shortlists before the nominations, his Days of Darkness was on it (though was not ultimately nominated). Which means that all four times an Arcand film was submitted, it was at least being shortlisted for the prize.

Canada also got a second nomination this decade, and it was the first time that nomination ever came from a film not directed by Arcand. It was also the first time the film was in a language other than French or directed by a woman. The film was Deepa Mehta's Hindi-language Water, and it was nominated in 2006. 

This notably came five years after Canada submitted a film in an Indigenous language for the first time, Zacharias Kunuk's Inuktitut film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Sadly, despite being widely regarded as the best film this country has ever made in any language, it did not get a nomination.

The 2010s

Canada kicked off the next decade with a bang, being nominated three years in a row with Denis Villeneuve's Incendies (in 2010), Philippe Falardeau's Monsieur Lazhar (in 2011) and Kim Nguyen's War Witch (in 2012). All three lost (to Denmark's In a Better World, Iran's A Separation and Austria's Amour, respectively), but by 2012, we had already surpassed our record for the most nominations in one decade. And interestingly, it was for three films that were in both French and another non-English language (Arabic in Incendies and Monsieur Lazhar, and Lingala in War Witch).

Unfortunately, this streak is where Canada's nomination history in this category currently ends. Despite some really worthy submissions over the course of the rest of the 2010s (including Louise Archambault's Gabrielle, Sophie Deraspe's Antigone and two more from Xavier Dolan: Mommy and It's Only the End of the World), we only made the shortlist one more time for It's Only the End of the World in 2016. 

That is, of course, until earlier this week.

The 2020s

Let's be honest: before Universal Language this year, none of Canada's submissions in the 2020s seemed to have much of a shot at being shortlisted, let alone nominated. The only time that was arguably not the case was for a brief moment in 2020 when we had submitted Deepa Mehta's film Funny Boy — before it was disqualified for containing too much dialogue in English (and replaced with Ivan Grbovic's Drunken Birds, a very good film that simply did not have a high enough profile that year). 

The tide has officially turned, though, with Rankin and company's film — Canada's 50th submission! — giving us our first shortlisted film since 2016. If nominated come Jan. 17, it would be Canada's first inclusion in the category in 12 years, as well as our very first primarily in Persian, our first directed by a Winnipegger, and, of course, our first featuring a Tim Hortons reimagined as an Persian tea lounge. Our fingers are firmly crossed.

Check out our predictions for this year's Academy Awards, which will add categories as the season goes on.