Foreign film watch: Uruguay, Mongolia submit

Today is officially the Academy deadline for Best Foreign Language Film submissions — though countries have made late entries in the past — so expect more titles to trickle in through the day. (Our contenders page is presently up to 59 titles, and counting.)

Greece, for example, is widely expected to submit Cannes prizewinner “Dogtooth” as their entry later today — we’re just awaiting the official announcement.

Two to formally add to the pile, however, are Uruguay’s “Bad Day to Go Fishing” and Mongolia’s “By the Will of Genghis Khan.” The latter country, making only their third ever submission, are seeking a first nomination; Uruguay, meanwhile, is still seeking a breakthrough after their only nominated film (“A Place in the World,” 1992) was disqualified by the Academy for having too little local input.

“A Bad Day to Go Fishing,” a debut effort from director Alvaro Brechner that played Critics’ Week at Cannes, is a dark comedy about a washed-up wrestler (not played by Mickey Rourke) and his devious manager attempting to scam a small town in 1960s South America. Variety dismisses it as “potentially engaging [but] a mere curiosity.”

Meanwhile, the Mongolian entry is, as you might have gathered from the title, a lavish biopic of the legendary Mongol warrior Genghis Khan. Whether the Academy will be in the mood for seconds just two years after nominating that other lavish Genghis Khan biopic is debatable, but their taste for the familiar should never be underestimated.

Finally, a brief amendment to news I reported some weeks earlier: Serbia recently switched their submission from the New York-set, Cyndi Lauper-featuring immigrant drama “Here and There” to the rather more hefty WWI drama “St. George Shoots the Dragon,” which was widely expected to be their pick in the first place. (I’ll be seeing it at the London Film Festival.) The change was made when the former film fell foul of the Academy’s foreign-dialogue quota, though it’s probably a wise move in any case.