A few questions...

"When Kieslowski was writing the film, did he write it in Polish and then get it translated? Or did he write it in french?"

Kieslowski and Piesiewicz wrote in Polish and had the non-Polish parts translated. (The Polish parts of White of course did not need translation.) Reportedly, Kieslowski's French wasn't all that good, and he worked with native French speakers (the actors and others) to get the French dialogue right.


"Are the films considered French or Polish?"

Or Swiss? It's something of a scandal that Red wasn't in the running for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. A French-language film, by a Polish director, made in Switzerland, it was not submitted by any of those three countries. Apparently Switzerland decided it wasn't sufficiently Swiss for them to submit, either that or the Academy decided that it wasn't Swiss enough to count as a Swiss film. (Not to pick on Switzerland, in any event. The previous year France failed to submit Blue, and Poland did not submit White. Apparently those films were not French or Polish enough.) I'm not sure what the full story on any of this is, but here's what one Mirimax executive had to say about the failure of Red to be nominated: "One of the best foreign language films of the year was not eligible because it was not sufficiently French or Swiss or Polish. If you have the system where every country submits a film, then it would be nice if there were more latitude in allowing that country to determine if the film is sufficiently from there." I guess that indicates it was the Academy that was at fault here.


-- TopFrog