Kazakh film among Oscar contenders

The Kazakh film Ayka has been shortlisted together with eight other films for the 2019 Oscar for best foreign-language motion picture.

The film by Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoy is about the ordeals of an unemployed single mother from post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan surviving in Moscow.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the shortlist on December 17. The list of final nominees will be narrowed further, and announced on January 22, and the awards ceremony is set or February 24, RFE/RL reported.

At the Cannes Film Festival in May, Ayka won an acting award for 33-year-old Kazakh actress Samal Eslyamova, who plays the film's main character.

Other foreign movies on the shortlist are Birds of Passage (Colombia), The Guilty (Denmark), Never Look Away (Germany), Shoplifters (Japan), Capernaum (Lebanon), Roma (Mexico), Cold War (Poland), and Burning (South Korea.)