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Nominated: Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - DramaWillem Dafoe portrays Vincent van Gogh in At Eternity’s Gate by Globe-winning director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 2008). The tormented Dutch painter has most famously been played on screen by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life.

At the most recent Luxor Film Festival, an annual showplace of African films, a specific documentary was one of the most talked-about subjects among filmmakers and audience. It told the stories of young African women who became pregnant without being married, and as a form of severe punishment were banned to an island without a chance of returning to their villages and families.

The Wedding Ring or Zin’naariya is a Nigerian drama-romance film written and directed by Rahmatou Keita, a Nigerian journalist, writer and film director whose career began in 1990. It is about Tiyaa, a young woman who is a member of an aristocratic family and who returns to her home for the winter holidays in the Sultanate of Damagaran in Niger Republic, after finishing college abroad.

Based loosely on a real-life incident, The Journey tells a spare and streamlined story that exists at the intersection of the political and the personal. Co-written and directed by Mohamed Jabarah Al-Daradji, who lost a close cousin and many other family members in the protracted and bloody Iran-Iraq War, the movie is a psychological drama that examines the issues of extremism and sectarian violence.

Spitak, is a town and urban municipal community in the northern Lori Province of Armenia. It is 96 km north of the capital, Yerevan, and 22 km west of the provincial center of Vanadzor.

Those foolishly thinking that Hollywood has an exclusive license on big-budget, patriotic movies based on real-life military exploits would be well advised to check out Operation Red Sea, a brawny, sprawling and surprisingly bloody and graphic action film from screenwriter Feng Ji and director Dante Lam. Detailing an escalating series of rescue missions, the Mandarin-language film, touted in local media as China’s first modern naval film, is a highly experiential, international cinematic call-and-response to movies like Black Hawk Down, Lone Survivor and American Sniper.

Memoir of War is French director Emmanuel Finkiel’s adaptation of  Marguerite Duras’ semi-autobiographical novel “The War: A Memoir”. It stars Mélanie Thierry (The Princess of Montpensier) as Duras.

Sulla Mia Pelle (On My Skin) reconstructs the events surrounding the death of Stefano Cucchi, a youngster taken into custody by the Italian military police (Carabinieri) in Rome, in 2008. Only recently, ten years after the mysterious events, and thanks to the relentless militancy and campaigning by his sister Ilaria, the truth about Cucchi’s death was unveiled, uncovering a major case of police brutality, corruption and cover-up.

When this big screen adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet was released in movie theaters in Georgia, not many people knew the secret behind it: Georgian actor/director Giorgi Megrelishvili filmed his movie entirely using mobile phones. Megrelishvili also set the original text in modern-day Georgia, an idea the director says he had been mulling for some time but was only recently able to bring to fruition.

For over 40 years the HFPA has recorded famous and celebrated actors, actresses and filmmakers. The world's largest collection of its kind - over 10,000  items- is now in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Margaret Herrick Library.