This is a list of submissions to the 29th Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film was created in 1956 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) to honour non-English-speaking films produced outside the United States. That year, AMPAS asked individual countries to submit their best films of the year for the inaugural Best Foreign Language Film category. In previous years, the Foreign Language Oscar had not been a regular award, and there were no nominees – a winner was simply announced at the Oscar ceremony.
The award has since been handed out annually, and countries are invited by the Academy to submit their best films for competition according to strict rules, with only one film being accepted from each country.
For the 29th Academy Awards only, the nominations were credited both to the submitting country and to the films' producers; in all later years, only the country has been credited as the nominee, rather than a producer or director. Eight films were submitted in the category Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and five of these were selected as Oscar nominees: Denmark, France, West Germany, Italy and Japan.
Italy was the inaugural winner with La Strada by Federico Fellini, which was also nominated for Best Writing, Best Original Screenplay.
Submissions Submitting country Film title used in nomination Original title Language(s) Producer(s) Director(s) Result Qivitoq Qivitoq - Fjeldgængeren Danish, Greenlandic O. Dalsgaard-Olsen Erik Balling Gervaise French Annie Dorfmann René Clément The Captain of Köpenick Der Hauptmann von Köpenick German Gyula Trebitsch, Walter Koppel Helmut Käutner La Strada Italian Dino De Laurentiis, Carlo Ponti Federico Fellini The Burmese Harp ビルマの竪琴 Japanese, English, Burmese Masayuki Takagi Kon Ichikawa Child of Sorrow Anak dalita Tagalog, Filipino, English Lamberto V. Avellana Afternoon of the Bulls Tarde de toros Spanish Ladislao Vajda The Staffan Stolle Story Ratataa Swedish Hasse Ekman
References
Sources Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences