The Oscars’ process for determining nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film is a little strange, and I don’t think it’s very widely understood – I only came across it within the last few years because I decided to see as many of the nominated films as I could. Any country can submit one film released in its market between October 1st and the following September 30th (so twelve months) in the year leading up to the awards; for the 2017 Academy Awards, a record 92 countries submitted films. The rules mean that a country with a long history of producing critically-acclaimed films, like France, or a country with a huge population and a large native film industry, like India, gets to submit the same number of films as Iceland, which was the smallest country (by population, 348,000) to submit a film this year. Last year, the South Korean film The Handmaiden, among the most critically acclaimed movies of the year, wasn’t even its own country’s nominee. This year, Loveless nearly lost out on a nomination because of political objections to its content.
The Academy changed their process about a decade ago to release a shortlist of nine films before they announce the final list of five nominees, which gives another little boost of publicity to four more films that would otherwise be shut out. This year’s shortlist included Félicité, the first-ever submission by Senegal; In the Fade, from Germany, which won the Golden Globe in the same category; Foxtrot, from Israel, which is just getting a U.S. theatrical release now; and The Wound, from South Africa, which is available now on Netflix. With dialogue primarily in the Bantu language Xhosa, with occasional Afrikaans and English, this 88-minute film feels like a thematic cousin to Moonlight, looking at a closeted gay man in South Africa as he tries to hide his identity from a traditional culture that sees homosexuals as less than men.
Based on a 2009 novel by the South African author Thando Mgqolozana, The Wound tells the story of Xolani, known to his friends as X, a quiet, lonely worker in a South African warehouse who is asked by a family friend to come serve as the ‘caregiver’ to the man’s son in the amaXhosa circumcision ritual known as ulwaluko, which marks the passage of young men, called initiates, into full manhood. The ritual takes place over several weeks on ‘the mountain,’ where X meets his old friend and secret paramour Vija, who has a wife and family at home. X’s charge, Kwanda, is seen as ‘soft’ (I think that’s code for gay) and pampered both by his father and by the other initiates, who also suspect that he’s gay, but while he’s not ‘out’ in the western sense, he’s certainly less willing to wear the mask that X does and fights back against the bullying of the other boys. Kwanda quickly grasps what X and Vija are up to, and that X is far more emotionally invested in the relationship than Vija is, eventually pushing X in a student-teaches-the-teacher twist to demand more for himself, if not with Vija then with someone else. The wound of the film’s title refers, of course, to the wounds of circumcision – treated in ghoulish fashion with traditional ‘herbs’ and techniques rather than modern medicine – and what X presumably has carried inside him his entire life as a gay amaXhosa man whose family and culture would view him as a degenerate and less than a man if they knew his orientation.
The South African film ratings board caved to public pressure and gave the film an X18 rating, akin to labeling it pornography, even though there’s nothing explicit in the film and any sex scenes are shown either in silhouette or at a distance. This only reinforces the story’s point, that the tyranny of these traditions actually serves to dehumanize men who are born gay into a world that won’t accept them. Kwanda has a dryly humorous rant towards the end of the film about how the ritual just shows how men are obsessed with their own genitalia – not long after one of the other initiates is showing off his “Mercedes-Benz” circumcision, which, fortunately, is not pictured – and serves as a sly, figurative criticism of the importance placed on a traditional ceremony focused on one physical manifestation of manhood that tells us nothing about the man within.