Feature-length submissions from the United States totaled 1,920 — a slight increase after falling by 6percentt last year — while foreign submissions climbed to 1,804.
The French dramatic comedy has grossed more than $400 million worldwide and is by far the most widely known of this year's foreign submissions.
Directed by Zhang Yimou, the movie was partly financed by loans from a state-owned bank and it is the country's foreign film submission for the Academy Awards.
The UK's foreign language submission at the Oscars will now be Tim Lyn's Eldra, a Welsh-language rites-of-passage story.
A director who challenged "Eklavya: The Royal Guard," India's foreign-language submission, withdrew her petition yesterday.
In a telephone interview from Belgium before heading to Los Angeles for the Golden Globes this weekend, Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 60, and Luc Dardenne, 57, who are the subject of a retrospective at the IFC Center in New York beginning this weekend, talked about their film, the vagaries of competing for film prizes and whether the Academy should actually pick foreign-language submissions.
At a time when many are pushing for greater equality between men and women behind the camera, the female-directed films at this year's AFI Fest span a wide range of genres, from the German comedy "Toni Erdmann" – one of nine films in the lineup that are Oscar foreign-language submissions this year – to the aforementioned, uncategorizable "The Lure," directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska.
The film, which originally premiered in 2009, was the first-ever foreign language Oscar submission from Ethiopia and is only now getting a belated local theatrical release.
Feature-length submissions from the United States totaled 1,943 — a slight increase from last year — while foreign feature-length submissions inched up to 1,869.
"Labor Day," Jason Reitman's romantic drama, and "The Lunchbox," a possible foreign-language Oscar submission from India, each features masterful scenes of food preparation integral to its story.
This marks the 25th anniversary of the Palm Springs International Film Festival; in the past, the festival would strive to show all the foreign language Oscar submissions.
