Best International Film submissions (2025 Oscars)

For Gints Zilbalodis, it all started with a cat.

Zilbalodis was still in high school, in Latvia, and dreaming of a career in animation, when he created a short film inspired by his pet feline. It was a simple tale, about a cat who overcomes his fear of water. “Many, many years later,” says Zilbalodis, “I decided to revisit this premise and make a feature film.”

The result, Flow, is a long way from that hand-drawn short. The movie, Zilbalodis’ second full-length animated feature following his much-praised 2019 debut Away, imagines a post-apocalyptic world devoid of humans where only animals remain. Our feline hero, a skinny grey cat with wide saucer eyes and a twitchy suspicion of any and all other species, barely manages to escape a pack of hungry dogs before being caught up in a cataclysmic flood. Finding refuge on a battered sailboat, it reluctantly teams up with a geographically diverse pack of critters, including an easy-going capybara, a covetous lemur, a dim-witted Golden Retriever and an aloof secretary bird on a free-floating adventure.

Like Away, Flow is shot entirely without dialogue and combines near photo-realistic 3D environments and character design with a more abstract, painterly style that makes the CGI feel hand made.

Flow premiered in Cannes, where it was quickly snatched up for North America by Sideshow and Janus Films. It went on to win big at the Annecy animation festival, taking four trophies, including the audience prize for best feature. After smashing box office records back home, Flow got the nod to be Latvia’s official entry for the 2025 Oscar race in the best international feature category.

Along the way, Zilbalodis and his animated cat have been winning over audiences and critics. “Flow is a joy to experience but also a deeply affecting story,” raved The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney in his Cannes review. “The work of a unique talent who deserves to be ranked among the world’s great animation artists.”

Zilbalodis spoke to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of Flow‘s U.K. premiere at the London Film Festival on making a movie with open-source software, using 3D technology to convey emotion and the unrivaled joys of watching internet cat videos.

The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, a documentary feature that China submitted as its entry for the best international feature Oscar competition, has been deemed ineligible for that award, The Hollywood Reporter has exclusively learned.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences confirms to THR that the film failed to meet their minimum language requirement for the award — a film must have “a predominantly (more than 50 percent) non-English dialogue track” to be eligible, per Academy rules — and that because Lisbon Maru was submitted just before the Oct. 2 submission deadline, it was too late, once this issue was discovered, for China to submit a different film.

The Sinking of the Lisbon Maru, which was directed by Ming Fan, Li Fang and Lily Gong, recounts the story of the titular “ship of death,” a cargo liner that was requisitioned by the Japanese Army during World War II. On Oct. 1, 1942, the ship was being used to transport POWs between Hong Kong and Japan when it was torpedoed in the East China Sea by an unwitting U.S. submarine. Three hundred and eighty four British POWs were rescued by Chinese fishermen, but 828 died, drowned or were shot by Japanese soldiers while attempting to escape.