Can you even have an international feature Oscar race without Neon?
Barely a decade old, the distributor co-founded by Tom Quinn has already won twice in the category — in 2020 for Parasite and this year with Sentimental Value — among 10 overall nominations. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story: At this year’s Oscars in March, four of the five nominees came from Neon — with a fifth movie, No Other Choice, likely just missing.
That’s absurd, but it’s not even the company’s biggest flex.
Neon has backed the Palme d’Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival seven years in a row. The studio team is so rightfully proud of the feat that it decorated Neon’s pop-up office on the Croisette with photos of all its past Palme winners, then had to make room for one more: Fjord, from Cristian Mungiu, which Neon acquired just before the fest and, yes, it won the Palme. And Fjord isn’t the only strong card in Neon’s deck — Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, also a Cannes prize winner, is even more acclaimed and hits theaters in late November.
Netflix is no slouch in the category either, winning twice with Roma and All Quiet on the Western Front. This year, the streamer picked up Spain’s La Bola Negra at Cannes shortly before it took home a best director prize for Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo. Now, after winning the People’s Choice Award at TIFF last month, La Bola Negra looks like a major player in many categories beyond international feature. Netflix is also backing another festival sensation, Possible Love, the Silver Lion winner at the Venice Film Festival and South Korea’s official Oscar submission, with star Jeon Do-yeon firmly in the mix of a fluid best actress field.
Right now on our international feature predications page, only one film not distributed by Netflix, Mubi or Neon is being predicted by anyone: Everytime, the official German submission backed by upstart distributor 1-2 Special. I’ll confess: I’m the outlier! But I think once more people discover the film, which won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes and will have a qualifying release this year, I won’t be the only one standing up for Sandra Wollner’s beguiling family drama.
Still, this year, it’s all about La Bola Negra vs. Neon. Or maybe not.