The following 20 films, all from different countries, were submitted for the 44th Academy Awards in the category Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The highlighted titles were the five nominated films, which came from Israel, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the USSR. The Oscar went to The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a drama about an aristocratic Jewish family in Italy.[1] France, which received 27 nominations between 1957 and 1991, failed to receive an Oscar nomination for only the fourth time since the inauguration of the Foreign Language Film award.
Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa gained his first nomination for the award (although he had received an honorary award at the 24th Academy Awards in 1951 for Rashomon) for Dodes'ka-den, a film which was a critical and commercial failure in his native Japan.
Bulgaria and Canada submitted films for consideration for the first time.